THE  GERMAN  MYTH 


THE    GERMAN   MYTH 

The  Falsity  of  Germany's 
"Social  Progress"  Claims 


BY 
GUSTAVUS   MYERS 


BONI    AND    LIVERIGHT 

NEW    YORK  1918 


Copyright,  1918,  by 
Boni  &  Livcright,  Inc. 


GERMANY'S  SINISTER  PROPAGANDA  13 

that  the  autocracy  was  hatching — schemes  that 
were  destined  to  bring  about  the  slaughter  and 
maiming  of  millions  of  the  very  people  for  whom 
the  German  Government  professed  such  tender 
concern. 

Again,  this  propaganda  tended  to  weaken  the 
respect  and  loyalty  of  other  peoples  for  their 
own  countries.  By  presenting  a  dazzling  pic- 
ture of  Germany,  it  has  been  a  propaganda  the 
effect  of  which  has  been  to  make  it  appear  that, 
in  sharp  contrast  with  the  German  Government, 
other  Governments  have  been  neglectful  in  car- 
ing for  the  vital  welfare  of  the  people.  It  served 
to  give  a  plausible  air  of  democracy  to  a  rigid 
autocracy  where  arbitrary  rule  goes  hand  in 
hand  with  feudal  castes  and  distinctions.  It 
spread  the  fiction  that  the  interests  of  the  com- 
mon people  were  the  prime  consideration  in 
Germany  when,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  voting 
power  is  effectively  concentrated  in  the  hands 
of  the  rich,  who  in  every  important  instance  sub- 
ordinate all  other  interests  to  their  own.  Using 
this  power  to  insure  themselves  control  not  only 
of  the  German  Empire  but  of  the  leading  States 
and  cities,  the  feudal  rulers  and  the  rich  have 
refused  the  common  people  proper  representa- 
tion and  have  blocked  every  one  of  their  efforts 
at  fundamental  and  effective  reforms.  Tinsel 

2033438 


14  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

reforms  for  show  purposes  they  have  allowed, 
but  no  real  reforms.* 

It  is  this  propaganda  that  was  long  respon- 
sible, and  to  a  certain  unfortunate  extent  is  still, 
in  blinding  many  people  to  the  brutalities  and 
tyranny  of  the  German  rulers.  Having  been 
thus  taught  to  look  up  to  the  German  Govern- 
ment as  the  grand  exponent  and  executor  of 
social  reforms,  there  are  still  those  who,  im- 
posed upon  by  years  of  this  seductive  propa- 
ganda, cannot  bring  themselves  to  believe  in 
the  horrors  committed  by  the  German  rulers. 
Or,  if  they  do  believe,  they  consider  that  those 
atrocities  are  more  than  counterbalanced  by  the 
German  Government's  alleged  enlightened  and 
advanced  social  measures  for  its  people. 

Some  of  those  who  have  diffused  this  propa- 
ganda in  the  United  States  have  been  mere  crea- 
tures of  the  German  Government,  getting  their 
recompense  in  some  way  or  other.  The  German 
professors,  all  subsidized  mouthpieces,  have 
been  among  the  most  active.  Others  have  been 
disciples  of  political  cults  trying  to  introduce 
the  conception  of  the  German  State  into  this 


*  As  this  goes  to  press  there  are  reports  from  Germany  that 
the  ruling  classes  there,  under  pressure  from  victorious  demo- 
cratic nations,  have  finally  decided  to  allow  electoral  and  some 
other  reforms.  But  until  these  "contemplated"  changes  are 
conclusively  established  and  in  actual  operation,  these  reports 
are  hardly  worthy  of  serious  consideration. 


GERMANY'S  SINISTER  PROPAGANDA  15 

country,  and  seeking  to  bulwark  their  cause 
and  to  increase  their  followers  and  vote  by 
magnifying  Germany's  accomplishments.  Aliens 
as  many  of  them  have  been  both  to  the  his- 
tory and  spirit  of  American  life  and  institu- 
tions, they  knew  little  or  nothing  of  the  progress 
made  here  and  thus  were  incapable  of  making 
comparisons.  Still,  others  of  these  propagan- 
dists have  been  literary,  academic,  or  political 
professionals  who  accepted  the  ready-made 
material  prepared  by  the  Kaiser's  publicity 
staff.  It  had  become  the  fashion  to  laud  Ger- 
many, and,  of  course,  they  fell  in  with  a  fashion 
which  caused  them  the  least  mental  effort  and 
brought  them  the  most  cheaply  acquired  notice 
and  revenue. 

These  are  some  of  the  tools  that  have  reeled 
out  this  propaganda  for  American  consumption 
— a  long  procession  of  the  same  mechanical  stuff 
in  articles,  books,  and  speeches.  Some  of  these 
books  are  of  recent  date  and  in  active  circula- 
tion ;  and  if  their  authors  do  not  get  decorations 
from  the  Kaiser  it  will  be  due  to  no  fault  of 
theirs. 

But  there  are  others  on  the  list,  although  un- 
conscious of  the  nature  of  the  service  they  have 
done  to  the  Kaiser's  Government.  There  are 
those  officeholders  who,  at  various  times,  made 


16  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

their  junketing  expeditions  to  Germany  ap- 
parently to  study  conditions.  Assuming  the 
correctness  of  what  they  were  told  by  flatter- 
ing German  officialdom,  they  came  back  and 
ground  out  solemn  official  reports  which  are 
little  other  than  praise-hymns  of  German  do- 
ings. And  (please  take  notice)  these  reports 
have  been  published  and  circulated  at  the  ex- 
pense of  the  very  American  people  whose 
achievements  Germany  has  been  most  keenly 
interested  in  slurring.  Having  this  official  sanc- 
tion, these  reports  were  consulted  by  a  succes- 
sion of  superficial  writers  who  in  newspaper  or 
magazine  articles  or  editorials  passed  some  of 
their  contents  on  in  appealing  doses  to  the 
American  people  at  large. 

A  genuine  investigation  would  have  exposed 
the  utter  falsity  of  these  sweeping  claims  of  the 
superiority  of  German  living  conditions.  Such 
an  investigation  would  have  revealed  that  the 
conditions  under  which  the  farmers  and  work- 
ing people  in  Germany  have  had  to  live  and 
work  were  deplorable  in  the  extreme.  It  would 
have  shown  it  to  be  the  normal  condition  that 
women  have  had  to  work  like  beasts  of  burden 
in  the  fields  and  cities.  It  would  have  proved 
the  abounding  evidences  of  wretched  sweat- 
shops in  city  and  rural  districts.  It  would  have 


GERMANY'S  SINISTER  PROPAGANDA  17 

brought  out  that  peasant  farmers  are  still  op- 
pressed by  feudal  servitude  dues.  It  would 
told  of  the  incredibly  scant  diet  on  which  they 
have  had  to  exist.  It  would  have  stated  the 
actual  facts  of  how  in  the  industrial  centers 
working  men,  women,  and  children  have  been 
compelled  to  toil  long  hours  for  starvation 
wages,  and  the  nauseating  housing  conditions 
under  which  many  of  them  have  been  herded. 

Any  real  investigation  would  have  shown, 
too,  the  grinding  oppressions  relentlessly  exer- 
cised upon  the  workers  of  all  descriptions  and 
the  farcical  nature  of  the  much-bepraised  so- 
called  social-insurance  laws.  It  would  have 
brought  to  light  the  facts  as  to  the  govern- 
mental loan  and  other  institutions  which  were 
devised  mainly  for  the  enrichment  of  the  land- 
owning aristocracy.  It  would  have  disclosed 
how  unemployment  and  strikes  have  been  ram- 
pant and  how  in  many  other  respects  the  people 
have  been  ruthlessly  exploited  and  subjugated 
politically  and  industrially. 

The  League  for  National  Unity  has  assembled 
the  facts  on  these  and  other  subjects  and  will 
now  present  them  to  the  American  people.  They 
are  facts  from  authoritative  German  sources, 
unquestioned  facts  all  of  them.  They  are  facts 
that  relate  to  conditions  right  up  to  the  begin- 


18  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

ning1  of  the  war,  and  now  that  they  are  made 
public  in  detail  the  American  people  will  realize 
that  no  government  has  ever  so  thoroughly  suc- 
ceeded in  gulling  not  only  its  own  people,  but 
the  whole  world,  in  its  boasted  claims  of  effi- 
ciency as  has  the  Kaiser's  Government. 


CHAPTER  H 

OPPRESSION  OF  THE  FARMERS 

"THE  German  Government,  in  its  social  and 
historical  composition,  is  an  instrument  for  the 
oppression  and  exploitation  of  the  working 
masses ;  it  serves  the  interests  of  Junkertom,  of 
capitalism,  and  of  Imperialism  both  at  home 
and  abroad." 

The  man  that  wrote  this  arraignment  was  one 
who  knew  the  German  Government  and  Ger- 
man affairs  thoroughly.  It  was  written  in  1916 
by  Dr.  Karl  Liebknecht,  German  Socialist 
leader  and  Reichstag  deputy,  and  he  is  now 
serving  a  sentence  of  four  years  one  month  in 
prison  for  his  denunciation  of  the  German 
Government's  pretensions  and  piratical  war 
objects.  The  German  Socialist  Party,  which 
had  become  imperial  property,  threw  him  out  of 
its  organization  for  daring  to  tell  the  truth. 

The  German  brand  of  social  reform  never 
did  originate  in  any  aim  to  help  the  common 

19 


20  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

people.  It  was  a  scheme  first  devised  by  Fred- 
erick the  Great.  He  started  his  wars  "so  that 
he  might  be  talked  about;"  and  after  he  had 
stolen  Silesia  from  Austria,  and  one-tenth  of 
Prussia's  population  had  been  killed  off  in  his 
war  butcheries,  he  began  his  pose  as  a  "social 
reformer. ' '  His  calculation  was  to  make  it  ap- 
pear that  the  Hohenzollerns  had  "the  welfare 
of  their  people  at  heart." 

The  people  that  Frederick  the  Great,  as  well 
as  his  successors,  however,  had  in  mind  were 
not  the  common  people.  These  were  haughtily 
looked  down  upon  as  clods,  as  feudal  serfs.  It 
was  the  landed  aristocracy  for  whose  benefit 
the  so-called  social  reform  measures  were 
drawn.  As  Germany  was  originally  an  agri- 
cultural country,  becoming  in  only  compara- 
tively recent  times  prominent  in  industry,  the 
first  "social  reform"  mandates  dealt  with  land 
questions.  In  fact,  Germany  is  still  largely 
agricultural;  its  occupational  census  of  1907 
showed  that  of  26,827,000  persons  occupied, 
9,883,000  were  in  agriculture  and  11,256,000  in 
manufactures. 

The  motive  back  of  this  alleged  social  legis- 
lation and  how  the  laws  have  operated  down  to 
these  present  times  may  be  instanced  in  the  case 
of  the  Prussian  Landschaften  (Mutual  Farm 


OPPRESSION  OF  THE  FARMERS    21 

Loan  Associations).  American  writers  inter- 
ested in  promoting  here  the  German  compulsion 
plan  have  fervently  pointed  out  the  example  of 
these  institutions  as  a  model  of  what  a  re- 
sponsive government  can  do  for  its  small  farm- 
ers. American  farmers  have  been  regaled  with 
impressive  stories  about  how  progressive  the 
German  Government  long  ago  was,  and  how 
backward  ours  is.  Our  farmers  have  been  told 
of  the  German  Government's  generous  provi- 
sions for  helping  the  small  farmer  to  get  credit. 
But  what  are  the  facts?  Dr.  Kapp-Konigs- 
berg,  general  director  of  the  Prussian  Land- 
schaften,  testifying  before  a  visiting  commis- 
sion in  1912,  admitted  that  this  system  of  credit, 
based  upon  landed  property,  had  been  estab- 
lished in  1767  for  the  benefit  of  the  landowning 
aristocracy.  He  further  admitted  that  it  had 
chiefly  benefited  them,  and  that  the  system  was 
now  substantially  the  same  as  when  it  was 
founded.  He  did  not  deny  that  the  millions  of 
peasant  farmers  had  received  very  little  benefit 
from  it.  ' '  Of  the  estates, ' '  he  testified,  ' '  which 
exceed  100  hectares  (a  hectare  is  not  quite  2y2 
acres)  66.3  per  cent  have  availed  themselves  of 
landschaft  loans ;  the  corresponding  proportion 
in  the  case  of  peasant  holdings  is  only  13.5  per 
cent." 


22  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

The  meaning  of  this  is  clear  when  it  is  ex- 
plained that  in  Germany  2,084,060  farm  hold- 
ings are  under  1*4  acres ;  1,294,449  farm  hold- 
ings are  from  1^4  to  5  acres;  1,006,277  farm 
holdings  from  5  to  12^  acres;  and  1,065,539 
farm  holdings  from  I2y2  to  50  acres.  The  Land- 
wirtschaftliche  Betriebsstatistik,  part  2  B,  pub- 
lished by  the  Imperial  Statistical  Office,  Berlin, 
1912,  further  shows  that  while  the  millions  of 
peasant  farmers  have  only  tiny  farms,  23,566 
Junkers — feudal  barons  or  magnate  farmers — 
own  nearly  25,000,000  acres  embraced  in  estates 
of  250  to  500  acres  and  more.  Of  the  farms  in 
Germany — 

36.3  per  cent  are  under  1*4  acres. 

22.6  per  cent  H/4  to  5  acres. 

17.5  per  cent  5  to  12  acres. 

18.6  per  cent  12i£  to  50  acres. 
4.6  per  cent  50  to  250  acres. 
0.2  per  cent  250  to  500  acres. 
0.2  per  cent  500  acres  and  over. 

It  can  therefore  be  seen  what  an  insignificant 
proportion  of  the  small  farmers  have  received 
the  aid  of  loans  from  these  Mutual  Farm  Loan 
Associations.  In  their  inception  they  were 
meant  for  the  landed  aristocrats  and  have  re- 
mained so. 

Compare   this   condition   with   that   in   the 


OPPRESSION  OF  THE  FARMERS    23 

United  States  where  the  Federal  farm  loan  act 
is  administered  exclusively  for  the  benefit  of 
small  farmers.  Under  this  act  no  loan  is  al- 
lowed to  anyone  who  does  not  actually  culti- 
vate the  soil.  This  shuts  out  absentee  landlords. 
To  help  the  small  farmer,  loans  from  $100  to 
$10,000  are  made.  These  loans  are  long-time 
loans  on  land  security  and  on  improvements  for 
from  5  to  40  years,  repayable  on  easy  terms  and 
low  rate  of  interest  on  the  installment  plan. 
Although  the  Federal  farm  loan  act  had  been 
in  operation  less  than  six  months,  $30,000,000 
was  loaned  to  actual  farmers  by  December  1, 
1917,  and  by  the  same  date  there  were  applica- 
tions from  small  farmers  for  a  total  of  $200,- 
000,000  in  loans.  The  loans  to  farmers  at  the 
present  date  reach  a  large  aggregate  which  is 
continuously  increasing. 

Another  edifying  example  of  the  Prussian 
Government's  solicitude  for  the  feudal  barons 
is  seen  in  the  law  of  1850  establishing  annuity 
banks.  Later  legislation  enlarged  their  func- 
tions. These  banks  are  governmental  credit 
institutions,  and  many  a  eulogy  on  them  has 
been  spun  here  by  those  who  professed  to  see  in 
them  the  paternal  care  of  the  Prussian  rulers 
for  the  small  farmers. 

For  what  purpose  were  they  actually  estab- 


24  THE  GEEMAN  MYTH 

lished?  For  the  benefit  of  the  feudal  barons  "in 
faciliating  the  redemption  of  the  old  servitudes 
incumbering  the  lands  of  peasants,  so  as  to 
enable  the  peasant  farmer  to  buy  off  the  feudal 
dues  incumbering  his  lands."  These  are  the 
exact  words  of  Dr.  Augsbin,  of  Berlin,  in  his 
testimony,  in  1912,  on  mortgage  and  other  co- 
operative banks. 

Feudalism  was  swept  away  here  by  the  Revo- 
lution, and  in  France  by  the  French  Eevolution. 
In  Canada  it  was  practically  driven  out  in  1837. 
But  the  peasant  farmers  of  Germany  are  still 
compelled  to  pay  off  feudal  dues  to  get  a  clear 
title  to  their  diminutive  bit  of  land.  The  scheme 
has  been  nicely  arranged  for  the  protection  and 
profit  of  the  feudal  barons.  Controlling  the 
Government,  they  order  legislation  modernizing 
feudal  tribute  and  making  the  Government  re- 
sponsible for  it.  The  annuity  banks  issue  an- 
nuity bonds,  and  the  Prussian  Government 
guarantees  them.  The  loans  run  from  50  to  60 
years,  and  the  German  peasant  farmer,  in  addi- 
tion to  the  crushing  load  of  taxes,  has  to  pay 
for  the  feudal  impositions  of  five  centuries  ago. 
By  the  year  1909  the  amount  of  these  annuity 
bonds  was  more  than  500,000,000  marks. 

Bismarck  is  credited  with  having  in  1879  been 
the  promoter  of  modern  "social  reform  legis- 


OPPRESSION  OF  THE  FARMERS    25 

lation. '  '  He  made  no  secret  of  the  fact,  in  his 
speech  in  the  Reichstag  on  February  24,  1881, 
that  one  of  his  strongest  motives  in  pressing  it 
was  to  serve  and  aggrandize  the  Hohenzollern 
dynasty.  He  sought  to  gild  over  Hohenzollern 
militarism  by  giving  the  Hohenzollerns  the 
reputation  of  "conserving  the  people's  wel- 
fare." But  one  real  ulterior  aim  was  to  take 
steps  to  conserve  human  flesh  so  that  it  could 
be  fitter  for  the  military  machine 's  needs.  An- 
other ulterior  aim  was  to  combat  and  under- 
mine the  rising  democratic  movement  of  that 
time.  Frederick  the  Great  saw  in  the  woman 
only  a  soldier  breeder,  and  in  the  male  baby 
only  a  future  Prussian  grenadier.  Similarly, 
to  this  very  day,  German  official  reports  on 
labor,  health,  housing,  insurance,  and  related 
subjects  consider  the  man  not  as  a  man  but 
chiefly  from  the  standpoint  of  his  capacity  as  a 
recruit. 

The  procession  of  writers  worshipping  Ger- 
man "social  reforms"  paint  Germany  as  the 
great  originator.  In  point  of  fact  Germany 
grabbed  many  of  its  ideas  from  other  countries 
and  in  the  cribbing  robbed  them  of  their  hu- 
manitarianism.  Testifying  in  1912,  Dr.  Land- 
ers, of  the  Chamber  of  Agriculture  at  Halle, 
Germany,  admitted  that  the  idea  of  farm  ex- 


26  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

periment  institutes  came  from  the  United 
States,  as  likewise  the  idea  of  stations  for  the 
preservation  of  farms.  As  long  ago  as  1858  a 
farmers '  convention  at  Centralia,  111.,  advocated 
wholesale  buying  and  selling  agencies  for  farm- 
ers. Ideas  in  other  fields  were  appropriated  by 
Germany  and  were  then  claimed  as  distinctly 
German. 

But  other  ideas  established  in  other  coun- 
tries giving  the  farmer  and  the  agricultural 
laborer  full  freedom  of  action  and  movement 
were  let  severely  alone  by  the  German  Govern- 
ment. It  was  willing  enough  to  adopt  any  idea 
increasing  production,  but  determined  not  to 
import  anything  that  would  interfere  with  the 
caste  yoke  or  give  the  farmer  initiative  and  in- 
dependence. The  German  criminal  code  still 
prohibits  agricultural  workers  the  right  to  or- 
ganize and  strike.  The  German  laws  enforce 
the  fullest  espionage  on  all  laborers,  agricul- 
tural and  others.  Every  person  coming  in  and 
out  of  a  rural  community  must  register  with  the 
local  representative  of  the  Government,  giving 
the  most  minute  particulars  about  his  or  her 
life  history.  Failure  to  do  so  is  promptly  re- 
ported to  the  police. 

The  peasant  farmer  is  sharply  defined  in  a 
class  by  himself.  In  the  United  States  every 


OPPRESSION  OF  THE  FARMERS    27 

agriculturist,  whether  proprietary  farmer, 
tenant  farmer  or  farm  laborer,  has  the  equal 
right  to  vote.  But  in  Germany  only  farmers 
(and  many  farmers  are  renters)  who  pay  taxes 
are  allowed  to  vote  for  the  Reichstag,  which  is 
merely  a  debating  society.  Women  have  no  vote. 
A  peasant  the  little  farmer  is  and  he  stays  a 
peasant.  The  educational  system  is  so  devised 
that,  generation  after  generation,  the  child  is 
educated  so  that  he  will  remain  in  the  station  of 
life  in  which  he  is  born.  The  Kaiser's  Govern- 
ment sees  well  to  it  that  the  child's  mind  and 
movements  are  molded  for  uses  the  autocracy 
wants  to  make  of  it  in  its  militaristic  and  in- 
trenched caste  system.  The  Junkers  believe  in 
the  divine  rights  of  kings,  and  lording  it  as 
they  do  over  the  peasants,  use  the  so-called  edu- 
cational system  to  fill  the  peasants '  minds  with 
that  doctrine. 

A  peasant  farmer  must  call  himself  peasant 
and  take  his  lowly  rank  as  such.  The  landed 
and  industrial  barons  who,  by  reason  of  the 
voting  system,  control  the  elections  and  political 
power,  use  that  power  against  the  small  farmer. 
"There  has  arisen  in  Germany  what  is  called 
the  Peasants'  League,"  reported  in  1912, 
William  C.  Teichmann,  United  States  consul  at 
Mannheim.  "This  Peasants'  League  represents 


28  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

the  small  farmers  almost  entirely,  because  the 
peasants  and  small  farmers  of  Germany  are 
under  the  impression  that  the  Agricultural 
League  represents  predominantly  the  large 
estates  in  contradistinction  to  those  of  the  small 
farmer.  The  Agricultural  League,  being  a  for- 
midable organization,  is  able  to  wield  a  power- 
ful influence  over  the  political  policies  of  the 
country." 

The  actual  conditions  of  the  millions  of  small 
farming  people  of  Germany  are  very  different 
from  the  glowing  accounts  that  have  been  dis- 
tributed by  the  propagandists. 

The  vast  proportions  of  farms  are  so  small 
that  machinery  cannot  be  used.  To  compete 
with  American  and  South  American  agriculture, 
the  labor  of  women  and  children  is  used.  Their 
wages  are  so  paltry  that  they  reduce  costs  of 
production.  Then,  of  course,  it  has  always  been 
the  fixed  policy  of  the  German  autocracy  to  en- 
courage woman  and  child  labor;  the  men  are 
needed  for  the  barracks. 

It  is  a  rare  sight  in  the  United  States  to  see 
native  women  doing  the  heavy  work  in  the  fields, 
and  in  stables  and  barns.  But  in  Germany  it  is 
usual  and  they  do  it  with  perfect  submission. 
Reporting  on  * '  The  German  Farmer  and  Co-op- 
eration," F.  J.  H.  von  Engelken,  a  member  of  a 


OPPRESSION  OF  THE  FARMERS    29 

visiting  American  commission  (he  is  now  presi- 
dent of  the  Federal  Farm  Loan  Bank  at  Colum- 
bia, S.  C.),  had  this  to  report  in  1913: 

1  'In  Germany,  it  mnst  be  understood,  the 
greater  proportion  of  the  farm  work  is  done  by 
women.  It  is  a  common  sight  to  see  women 
hoeing  or  pitching  hay  or  spreading  manure, 
and  they  do  it  well  and  cheerfully.  The  girls 
of  the  poorer  families  go  into  service  as  maids, 
which  means  that  they  do  not  only  a  share  of  the 
housework,  but  also  their  full  proportion  of  the 
work  about  the  stables  and  in  the  fields.  For 
this  service  a  girl  of  say,  16  or  17  years,  will 
receive  wages  of  $3  a  month,  with  board  and 
lodging." 

The  elaborate  report  issued  in  1908  of  the 
British  Board  of  Trade,  a  document  based  upon 
the  reports  of  burgomasters,  German  municipal 
statistical  boards  and  German  trades  unions, 
says  (p.  368) : 

"In  rural  Germany  everywhere  women  take 
their  place  in  the  field  and  farmyard,  in  the  work 
of  forest  and  garden,  and  in  any  German  town 
they  may  be  seen  drawing  along  the  streets  little 
carts  with  wood  and  other  wares.  In  Bavaria, 
however,  women  work  alongside  of  men  in  call- 
ings still  more  onerous.  They  act  as  hod-bear- 
ers; they  break  huge  stones  with  heavy  ham- 


30 


mers  on  the  site  of  building  operations;  they 
chop  faggots  in  the  street  for  householders,  and 
Carry  heavy  loads  on  the  wooden  racks  suspend- 
ed from  their  shoulders ;  and  in  Munich  a  con- 
siderable part  of  the  work  of  street  cleaning 
is  done  by  women  who  are  paid  2  shillings  six- 
pence (about  62  cents)  for  a  long  day's  exer- 
tion." 

It  may  be  added  that  it  has  been  far  from 
uncommon  in  Germany  to  see  women  hitched 
with  cattle  and  dogs  drawing  ploughs  and  carts. 

In  1912,  according  to  testimony  on  farm 
wages,  a  woman  farm  laborer  got  1.60  to  2 
marks  a  day  (38  to  48  cents  a  day),  and  chil- 
dren over  12  years  1  mark  a  day  (24  cents),  in 
both  cases  without  board.  Men  farm  laborers 
were  getting  3  marks  (72  cents)  a  day.  Ac- 
cording to  the  evidence  of  Dr.  Johannsen,  direc- 
tor of  the  Hanoverian  Chamber  of  Agriculture, 
and  of  Prof.  Vieth,  director  .of  the  Dairy  Insti- 
tute of  Hamelin,  Hanover,  these  wages  were 
considered  *  *  tremendous. ' ' 

"The  common  meal  of  the  German  farmer," 
reports  von  Engelken,  "is  a  large  bowl  of  soup 
of  one  kind  or  another,  and  dry  rye  bread. 
Such  meat  as  is  needed,  generally  in  the  form 
of  sausage,  is  put  up  at  home  in  the  fall. "  The 
American  farmer  knows  what  his  generous  diet 


OPPRESSION  OF  THE  FARMERS    31 

is — meat,  chicken,  plenty  of  vegetables,  eggs, 
milk,  wheat  bread,  fruit,  and  other  edibles. 

It  is  in  the  German  rural  districts,  too,  where 
some  of  the  worst  sweatshop  conditions  exist. 
Mannheim,  for  example,  is  an  important  center 
of  the  tobacco  and  cigar  industry.  The  British 
Board  of  Trade,  getting  its  facts  from  the  local 
authorities,  reported  in  1908: 

"The  real  work  of  cigar  making,  in  all  of  its 
various  processes,  is  a  rural  industry.  The 
reason  for  this  is  that  only  in  the  country  is  a 
sufficiency  of  labor  procurable  at  a  low  rate  of 
pay.  *  *  *  In  the  country  whole  families  often 
work  together,  both  in  the  factory  and  at  home. 
The  father  may  make  the  wrapper,  his  wife  and 
girls  do  the  rolling,  and  by  thus  co-operating  as 
much  as  30  shillings  ($7.50)  a  week  may  be 
earned.  As,  however,  work  is  in  many  cases 
intermittent,  and  is  made  to  fit  in  with  house- 
hold and  other  duties,  earnings  are  very 
irregular. ' ' 

The  ordinary  taxes  and  exactions  put  upon 
the  small  farmer  are  grinding  enough.  But  to 
these  are  added  oppressive  taxes  for  the  very 
objects  vaunted  as  benefiting  the  farmer  and 
other  classes.  The  fiction  is  that  the  farmer 
and  worker  are  indulgently  protected  by  govern- 
mental schemes  such  as  sick  insurance,  old  age 


32  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

insurance,  and  insurance  against  accidents.  The 
fact  is  that  these  very  measures,  which  in  effect 
do  not  even  reach  the  value  of  poorhouse  relief, 
are  helping  to  drive  the  farmer  into  further 
indigency. 

Thus,  in  an  address  delivered  at  Dresden  five 
years  ago  Herr  Otto  Steiger  Lentiwitz,  a  noted 
authority  on  agriculture,  complained  that 
"Saxon  agriculture  is  burdened  with  great 
charges  and  expenses.  Contributions  to  sick 
insurance,  old-age  insurance  and  insurance 
against  accidents,  have  risen  enormously,  and 
now  amount  to  approximately  8  to  10  marks 
per  hectare  of  cultivated  land.  The  taxation 
of  agricultural  property  is  by  no  means  favor- 
able, and  taxes  have  risen  from  year  to  year." 

The  system  drives  the  so-called  beneficiaries 
into  pauperism,  and  then  what  does  it  do  in 
return!  In  exchange  for  the  burden  of  insur- 
ance taxes  it  gives  them  or  their  survivors  a 
sum  so  ridiculously  petty  that  an  almshouse  in- 
mate in  other  countries  luxuriates  in  plenty  in 
comparison.  According  to  the  Amtliche  Nach- 
richten  des  Reichs-Versicherung-Amt,  Berlin, 
the  average  invalidity  pension  in  1913  was 
$46.51  a  year — less  than  $1  a  week.  The  aver- 
age sickness  pension  was  $48.45  a  year — also 
less  than  $1  a  week.  The  average  old-age  pen- 


OPPRESSION  OF  THE  FARMERS    33 

sion  was  $39.75  a  year — about  76  cents  a  week. 
The  average  widow's  and  widower's  pension 
was  $18.49  a  year — about  35  cents  a  week.  The 
average  widow's  sickness  pension  was  $18.59 
a  year,  and  the  average  orphan's  pension  $19.07 
a  year.  These  were  the  pensions  in  a  country 
where  the  poorest  paid  adult  living  in  the  lowest 
possible  scale  needed  at  least  $140  to  $155  a  year 
for  the  cost  of  the  barest  subsistence. 


CHAPTER  HI 

THE  HABD-DEIVEN,  UNDERPAID  WORKEBS 

THE  series  of  eulogies  of  the  German  Gov- 
ernment's "efficiency"  have  particularly  ac- 
claimed its  treatment  of  its  working  people. 

Americans  have  been  repeatedly  assured  that, 
as  compared  with  those  of  other  countries,  Ger- 
man workers  have  been  exceptionally  well  fa- 
vored. They  have  been  represented  as  being 
endowed  with  superior  working  conditions. 
They  have  been  described  as  well  paid,  well 
fed,  and  wonderfully  well  housed.  Little  or  no 
mention  was  made  of  child  labor,  sweatshops, 
infant  mortality,  unemployment,  and  strikes. 
Pauperism,  we  were  told,  was  rare.  Every  de- 
tail otherwise  was  so  admirably  " regulated" 
by  the  German  Government,  these  rhapsodists 
have  insisted,  that  the  German  workers  were  a 
grateful,  comfortably  satisfied  class.  This,  it 
has  been  explained,  is  the  reason  why  they  were 
so  willing  to  fight  and  die  for  their  autocracy. 

But  the  facts  show  a  very  different  state  of 
34 


THE  HARD-DRIVEN  WORKERS      35 

affairs  from  the  accounts  in  these  imaginative 
stories. 

Long  after  workers  in  other  countries  had 
been  put  on  a  short  workday,  the  German  work- 
ers have  been  forced  to  work  on  an  arduous 
schedule  that  was  discarded  in  more  progressive 
countries.  The  10-hour  workday  was  estab- 
lished in  United  States  public  establishments  by 
President  Van  Buren,  in  1840.  It  became  gen- 
eral in  this  country  at  a  time  when  the  German 
worker  was  toiling  11  to  14  hours  a  day.  The 
8-hour  day  received  congressional  sanction  in 
1869,  and  in  the  following  decades  became  gen- 
eral in  many  of  the  trades  in  the  United 
States. 

But  in  Germany,  up  to  the  very  beginning 
of  the  war,  the  general  workday  for  highly 
skilled  trades  was  from  57  to  60  hours  a  week, 
and  in  other  trades  12  to  14  hours  a  day  were 
common.  Much  has  been  extravagantly  written 
of  the  benevolence  of  the  Krupps  as  "ideal  em- 
ployers" (the  Kaiser  is  said  to  be  a  secret 
partner).  Yet,  according  to  the  Berlin  Vor- 
waerts,  of  August  12,  1917,  the  workingmen  in 
the  Krupp  and  Howaldt  building  yards  were 
pleading  for  a  9-hour  workday. 

German  workmen  did  not  get  the  privilege 
to  organize  until  long  after  other  countries  had 


36  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

accorded  it  as  a  fundamental  right.  Even  to- 
day their  meetings  are  still  under  close  bureau- 
cratic surveillance  and  threat  of  dispersion  by 
the  police.  The  fact  that  the  German  Social 
Democrats  are  at  this  late  day  making  as  one 
of  their  immediate  demands  the  right  of  assem- 
blage without  police  interference  shows  the 
paltry  amount  of  political  freedom  that  the  Ger- 
man people  are  allowed  to  have  by  intrenched 
Junkerdom. 

German  workers  have  been  slain  by  the  mil- 
lions for  the  aggrandizement  of  an  autocracy 
run  by  the  military  caste,  which  regards  them 
as  mere  drudges.  How  militarism  contemptu- 
ously treats  their  demands  is  shown  by  a  recent 
typical  incident  in  Saxony.  The  piece-work 
wages  paid  in  the  textile  industry  there  have  for 
years  been  from  less  than  1  cent  to  less  than  8 
cents  an  hour,  and  general  weekly  wages  of 
from  $1.30  to  $2.12.  Adult  males  are  paid  at 
the  rate  of  6  to  Jess  than  8  cents  an  hour.  The 
Berlin  Vorwaerts,  of  August  21, 1917,  told  how 
the  textile  workers  humbly  petitioned  that  they 
could  not  live  on  these  starvation  wages  and 
how  they  asked  for  the  granting  of  minimum- 
wage  scales.  "Gen.  Groner,  however,  who  is 
charged  with  the  enforcement  of  the  auxiliary 
service  law,  to  which  all  industrial  establish- 


THE  HARD-DRIVEN  WORKERS      37 

ments  are  subject,  has  openly  declared  himself 
against  minimum  wages,  and  the  army  officers 
in  charge  of  the  local  war  offices,  of  course, 
maintain  the  same  attitude  as  their  supe- 
rior." 

When,  in  Landeshut,  Silesia,  the  textile  work- 
ers appealed  to  the  war  arbitration  office  at 
Posen,  the  presiding  officer,  without  making 
any  investigation,  gruffly  declared  that  their 
present  wages  were  sufficiently  high,  and  that 
if  their  demands  caused  the  closing  of  the  mills 
"the  male  workers  would  be  put  into  the  army 
or  into  other  establishments  working  on  war 
material,  while  the  female  workers  would  be 
sent  to  west  Prussia  to  work  on  farms.  The 
commanding  general  in  Breslau  intimated, 
moreover,  that  he  would  proceed  against  those 
organized  workers  who  had  been  reported  to 
him  to  have  used  intimidation  in  requesting 
fellow  workers  to  join  their  organization.  He 
also  issued  an  order  that  even  negotiations  be- 
tween individual  workmen's  committees  and 
their  employers  must  be  brought  to  his  notice 
8  to  10  days  in  advance,  in  the  same  manner  as 
political  meetings." 

This  summary  attitude  toward  labor  is  not 
exceptional,  due  to  war  conditions.  It  has  al- 
ways been  the  unvarying  attitude  of  the  autoc- 


38 


racy  and  its  military  caste.  As  long  ago  as 
1890  the  Kaiser  in  a  public  speech  at  the  Berlin 
Conference  on  Secondary  Education  sneered  at 
"an  over  production  of  a  highly  educated  peo- 
ple," declared  that  "the  gentlemen  who  write 
for  the  press  are  a  danger  to  us,"  and  concluded 
with  habitual  emphasis  on  the  autocratic  I:  "I 
will  therefore  approve  the  foundation  of  no 
more  such  schools  in  the  future  unless  their  ne- 
cessity can  be  proved.  "We  have  enough  of 
them  already."  The  Kaiser  wanted  no  inde- 
pendent, thinking  people;  a  submissive  mass 
was  what  the  military  machine  demanded  and 
meant  to  have;  education  was  to  be  re- 
served as  much  as  possible  for  the  privileged 
castes. 

During  the  very  years  when  eulogists  idealiz- 
ing German  conditions  were  propagandizing  the 
United  States,  the  status  of  German  workers 
was  far  behind  that  of  American,  British, 
French,  and  other  workers. 

The  German  worker  never  has  had  any  real 
political  power  and  has  none  now.  Under  the 
old  election  laws,  still  in  force,  the  Junkers  con- 
trol the  nation  and  the  big-propertied  interests 
the  cities.  The  vote  is  graded  according  to  the 
amount  of  taxes  paid.  Property  qualification 
for  elections  was  abolished  in  the  United  States 


THE  HAKD-DRIVEN  WORKERS      39 

nearly  a  century  ago.  It  has  up  to  now  been  the 
universal  system  in  Prussia  and  Saxony  and  the 
prevalent  system  in  the  cities  of  South  Germany. 
This  system  allows  in  Berlin,  for  example,  one 
first-class  vote  the  same  representation  in  the 
city  government  as  375  third-class  or  workers' 
votes. 

The  worker  is  deprived  of  political  power. 
When  he  goes  to  work  in  a  factory  his  self- 
respect  is  also  taken  from  him.  He  has,  accord- 
ing to  J.  W.  Sullivan,  who  investigated  indus- 
trial conditions  in  Germany  for  the  American 
Federation  of  Labor,  to  produce  his  police  card, 
giving  the  most  personal  and  humiliating  details 
of  himself.  Possibly  he  may  be  favored  with  a 
job — if  the  police  certify  that  his  political  opin- 
ions are  "safe"  and  if  there  are  jobs  enough 
to  go  round. 

For  notwithstanding  the  glowing  picture  of 
the  eulogists  of  Germany  being  a  land  where  the 
Government  has  seen  to  it  that  its  workers  get 
work,  there  always  has  been  a  chronic  unem- 
ployed problem  there.  In  the  Grand  Duchy  of 
Baden  (population  2,142,833),  for  example, 
there  were,  in  1913,  according  to  the  report  of 
United  States  Consul  Milo  A.  Jewett,  stationed 
at  Kehl,  this  proportion  of  male  applications 
for  jobs : 


40  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

177  applications  for  100  positions  in  the  cloth- 
ing industry. 

229  applications  for  100  positions  in  the  metal 
industry. 

206  applications  for  100  positions  in  the  leath- 
er industry. 

279  applications  for  100  positions  in  the  build- 
ing  industry. 

383  applications  for  100  positions  in  the  food 
industries. 

231  applications  for  100  positions  in  the  join- 
ing and  cabinetmaking  industry. 

348  applications  for  100  positions  in  the  stone 
and  earthwork  industry. 

215  applications  for  100  positions  in  the  do- 
mestic service. 

541  applications  for  100  positions  as  machin- 
ists and  firemen. 

In  brief,  including  both  men  and  women,  the 
statistics  of  the  official  employment  bureaus  of 
the  Grand  Duchy  of  Baden  show  that  during 
1913  there  were  278,910  applications  for  work, 
against  249,434  in  1912,  and  that  only  163,122  in 
1913  succeeded  in  getting  work.  The  general 
average  was  that  for  every  100  jobs  offered  in 
1913  there  were  171  applications.  In  January, 
1914,  for  every  100  registered  jobs  for  men 
there  were  273  applications,  and  for  every  100 


THE  HAED-DRIVEN  WORKERS      41 

registered  jobs  for  women  there  were  89  appli- 
cations. (See  U.  S.  Consular  and  Trade  Re- 
ports, No.  100,  Apr.  29,  1914,  p.  556.) 

But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  official  figures 
never  give  the  full  extent  of  unemployment  in 
Germany.  The  Report  of  the  British  Labor 
Party  and  Trade  Union  Commission,  1910,  on 
"Life  and  Labor  in  Germany"  tells  (p.  30) 
that  in  periods  of  depression  many  men  in  the 
building  and  other  trades  go  back  into  the  coun- 
try districts  and  work  on  the  land.  "They 
never  figure  in  unemployed  lists  in  Germany, 
although  the  same  class  of  men  would  do  so  in 
this  country.  Then  the  actual  volume  of  unem- 
ployment is  not  revealed  in  their  figures  for 
various  reasons.  In  the  first  place,  the  sick  in- 
surance figures  are  always  found  to  be  highest 
in  periods  of  depression,  and  the  explanation 
is  that  the  man  who  would  otherwise  be  em- 
ployed, very  often,  if  ailing,  goes  sick.  But 
the  explanation,  on  the  other  hand,  may  well  be 
that  the  workers  are  living  very  near  the  margin 
of  sickness  when  in  receipt  of  regular  wages, 
and  that  the  hardening  conditions  of  life  inci- 
dental to  industrial  depression  drive  many 
beyond  it. " 

Unemployment    among    members    of    trade 
unions  in  Germany  steadily  increased  from  1.6 


42  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

per  cent  of  total  membership  in  1907  to  2.9  per 
cent  of  total  membership  in  1913,  according  to 
the  detailed  figures  set  forth  in  Statistisches 
Jarbuch  fiir  das  Deutche  Beiche,  published  in 
Berlin,  1916  (p.  121).  The  average  total  mem- 
bership of  German  trade  unions  unemployed 
from  1907  to  1913,  inclusive,  was  2.3  per 
cent. 

The  replies  of  German  employers  and  trade 
union  officials  to  the  British  Board  of  Trade 
Inquiry,  in  1908,  showed  that  the  average  usual 
hours  of  labor  a  week  for  certain  trades  speci- 
fied were  : 

54  hours  for  compositors. 

59  hours  in  the  building  trades. 

hours  in  the  engineering  trades. 


By  comparison  with  England  the  hours  of 
work  were  from  8  to  12  per  cent  higher  in  Ger- 
many. And  compared  with  the  work  hours  of 
the  same  trades  in  the  United  States  at  the  same 
time,  the  work  hours  were  from  10  to  34  per  cent 
higher  in  Germany. 

This  is  shown  by  reference  to  Bulletin  131, 
U.  S.  Bureau  of  Labor  Statistics,  1913,  giving 
the  union  scale  of  wages  and  hours  of  labor  in 


THE  HARD-DRIVEN  WORKERS      43 

the  United  States,  1907  to  1912.    The  compari- 
son of  the  week  labor  hours  showed : 

Germany  United  States 

Hours 

Compositors  54  Average  48  hours;  less  in 

many  places. 

Building  trades  59  Generally    44    hours ;     48 

hours  for  structural  iron 
workers. 

Engineering  trades  . . .    59J<£  Generally  44  to  48  hours ; 

machinists  and  black- 
smiths 54  hours  gener- 
ally. 

This  is  a  typical  comparison  between  the 
hours  of  skilled  labor  in  Germany  and  the 
United  States,  qualified  by  the  fact  that  in  the 
last  10  years  the  American  worker  generally 
has  obtained  a  shorter  and  shorter  workday, 
whereas  in  Germany  the  57  to  60  hour  a  week 
has  generally  remained  even  for  many  of  the 
most  thoroughly  organized  German  labor 
unions. 

The  wages  paid  in  Germany  for  excessive 
toil  are  so  scanty  that  the  pay  has  in  many 
cases  been  starvation  or  semi-starvation  wages. 
So  much  is  it  so,  that  as  we  shall  see,  the  wives 
and  children  of  the  workingmen  are  driven  to 
work  in  mines,  factories  and  shops  or  worse  to 
help  piece  together  the  family's  living  ex- 
penses. 

Some  years  ago  Dr.  R.  R.  Kucznski,  director 
of  the  municipal  statistical  office  of  Schoene- 


44  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

berg,  was  commissioned  by  the  Imperial  Treas- 
ury Department  to  prepare  a  memorial  on  the 
trend  of  wages  in  Germany.  The  facts  in  this 
memorial,  published  at  Berlin,  in  1909,  showed 
these  wages  in  1907 : 

Miners,  hard-coal  mines,  an  average  of  $334 
a  year. 

Miners,  soft-coal  mines,  an  average  of  $297 
a  year. 

Workers  in  salt  mines  and  works,  an  average 
of  $309  a  year. 

Miners  in  copper  mines,  an  average  of  $271 
a  year. 

Miners  in  iron  mines,  an  average  of  $266  a 
year. 

Masons,  $1.26  to  $1.61  a  day. 

Carpenters,  $1.24  to  $1.61  a  day. 

Plumbers,  gas  fitters,  and  steam  fitters,  $1.13 
to  $1.39  a  day. 

Stonecutters,  $1.62  to  $1.72  a  day. 

Krupp  plant,  at  Essen,  average  daily  earn- 
ings, $1.27. 

Journeymen  printers,  $6.55  to  $7.44  a  week. 

Skilled  State  railway  shopworkers,  86  cents 
to  $1.02  a  day. 

Engineers,  conductors,  etc.,  State  railway,  70 
cents  a  day. 

Artisans  and  mechanics,  State  railway,  98 
cents  to  $1.09  a  day. 


THE  HARD-DRIVEN  WORKERS      45 

Employees,  Prussian-Hessian  State  railway, 
average  76  cents  a  day. 

Able-bodied  seamen,  Baltic  and  North  Sea, 
average  $15.18  a  month. 

This  list  includes  skilled  men  only.  Other 
kinds  of  workers  in  these  different  industries 
received,  of  course,  much  less  than  the  skilled. 
An  investigation  at  the  same  time  made  by  the 
Federation  of  German  Woodworkers — an  indus- 
try employing  nearly  800,000  persons — dis- 
closed that 

The  average  weekly  labor  hours  of  joiners, 
turners,  brush  and  basket  makers,  wheelwrights, 
wooden-shoe  makers,  box,  and  toy  makers  were 
57  hours. 

The  average  weekly  earnings  of  adult  males 
were  $5.99  a  week. 

In  1908  the  German  Imperial  Statistical  Office 
published  a  detailed  study  of  the  cost  of  living 
of  852  families  of  German  wage  earners  dur- 
ing 1907  and  part  of  1908.  Most  of  these  fam- 
ilies lived  in  large  cities.  The  study  revealed 
that  the  average  annual  expenditure  per  family 
of  the  852  families  was  $531.70,  thus  distributed : 

Food   $242.17 

Clothing  67.22 

Dwelling 95.50 

Heating  and  lighting 21.62 

Miscellaneous   .  105.19 


46  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

The  study  further  showed  that  the  yearly 
earnings  of  unskilled  workmen  were  $310  and 
those  of  skilled  workmen  $373. 

The  1910  report  of  the  British  Labor  Party 
and  Trade  Union  Commission  on  "Life  and 
Labor  in  Germany"  stated  (p.  39)  that  the  aver- 
age man  wage  earner's  annual  wages  in  320 
households  investigated  in  40  towns  were 
$360.89,  and  the  family's  annual  expenditure 
was  $443.55.  This  disparity  between  income 
and  expenditure  continued  in  following  years. 

According  to  a  summary  sent  out  by  the  Ger- 
man Imperial  Statistical  Office,  the  average 
earnings  of  men  per  day  in  certain  important 
groups  of  industries  were,  in  March,  1914 : 

Metal  industry $1.32 

Engineering  industry 1.28 

Electrical  industry  1.07 

Paper  industry 93 

Woodworking  industry 1.01 

Chemical  industry 1.24 

Stoneworking  and  pottery 1.07 

Food,  drink,  and  tobacco 1.36 

Leather  and  rubber 1.20 

In  the  textile  industry  wages  were  consider- 
ably lower  than  the  low  wages  in  other  indus- 


THE  HARD-DRIVEN  WORKERS      47 

tries.  An  article  in  the  Soziale  Praxis,  of  Ber- 
lin, November  11,  1915,  stated  that  in  normal 
times  weekly  wages  of  from  7  to  10  marks  ($1.67 
to  $2.38)  for  female  workers  and  from  14  to  15 
marks  ($3.33  to  $3.57)  for  male  workers  repre- 
sented the  average  wages  paid  in  some  import- 
ant textile  districts  in  Germany.  These  wages 
in  normal  times,  it  was  declared,  were  hardly 
sufficient  for  a  bare  existence  at  a  minimum 
standard  of  living,  low  as  that  standard  was. 

How,  in  the  face  of  enormously  increasing 
costs  of  living,  did  German  workers  manage  to 
exist  ?  How  have  they  been  able  to  make  up  the 
deficit  between  what  the  husband  earned  and 
what,  at  the  very  lowest,  had  to  be  spent  for  the 
family?  This  apparent  mystery  is  explained  in 
the  next  chapter. 


CHAPTER  IV 

INDUSTRIAL  ENSLAVEMENT  OF  WOMEN  AND 
CHILDREN 

So  low  and  woefully  insufficient  have  been 
the  wages  paid  to  men  in  Germany  that  the 
wife  and  often  the  children  have  been  forced  to 
work  in  mills,  mines,  and  shops  to  help  pay  the 
family's  bare  living  expenses.  Even  with  two 
or  more  members  of  the  family  working  out, 
the  income  has  still  been  inadequate  to  meet  the 
most  ordinary  wants.  Great  numbers  of  work- 
ingmen's  families  have  had  to  take  in  boarders 
and  lodgers  in  their  small,  congested  quarters. 

The  investigation  made  of  852  families  under 
the  direction  of  the  Imperial  Statistical  Office 
of  Germany  showed  that  in  278  of  these  fam- 
ilies the  wife  had  to  work  out.  In  about  one- 
eighth  of  the  families  children  under  15  years 
of  age  worked  and  contributed  their  slender 
earnings.  This  was  a  high  proportion  consider- 
ing that  numerous  young  married  couples  and 

48 


WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN  49 

childless  couples  were  included  in  the  list  of 
families.  Moreover,  it  has  been  a  customary 
practice  on  the  part  of  many  German  working- 
men  to  try  to  conceal  as  much  as  possible  the 
fact  that  their  women  and  children  worked  as 
wage  earners.  It  is  more  than  likely,  therefore, 
that  the  total  was  not  fully  reported. 

In  1913  a  report  was  made  to  the  United 
States  Department  of  State  by  Consul  General 
T.  St.  John  Gaffney,  at  Dresden,  on  "Women 
Workers  in  Germany."  This  is  the  same  Gaff- 
ney  who,  because  of  his  pro-German  activities, 
was  removed  from  his  post  by  our  Government 
during  the  war.  Consul  General  Gaffney  re- 
ported that : 

"The  number  of  women  wage  earners  in  Ger- 
many is  now  larger  than  in  any  other  European 
country,  and  from  census  reports  it  appears  that 
it  is  steadily  increasing. 

"At  present  a  full  third  of  the  economic  labor 
of  the  Empire  is  being  carried  on  by  women. 
Statistics  recently  published  show  that  there  are 
9,500,000  wage-earning  women  in  Germany, 
which  means  that  nearly  every  second  adult 
woman  is  earning  her  own  living.  The  women 
who  work  in  the  factories  are  employed  chiefly 
in  Prussia,  Saxony,  Bavaria,  Baden,  Wurtem- 
berg,  Hesse,  and  Alsace-Lorraine,  the  textile 


50  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

factories  of  Prussia  and  Saxony  alone  employ- 
ing over  400,000  women." 

Up  to  1910,  Gaffney  reported,  women  in  Ger- 
many worked  11  hours  a  day ;  in  that  year  Gov- 
ernment regulations  reduced  the  working  day 
to  10  hours,  and  8  hours  on  Saturdays.  (See 
U.  S.  Daily  Consular  Trade  Reports,  No.  88, 
pp.  296-297.) 

What  Mr.  Gaffney,  in  his  pro-German  par- 
tiality, did  not  tell  was  that  a  great  part  of  the 
work  done  for  many  German  industries  has  been 
carried  on  in  home  sweatshops,  under  repellant 
conditions,  and  at  hours  of  work  ranging  up  to 
14  a  day. 

An  investigation  made  by  the  Berlin  Cham- 
ber of  Commerce,  in  1905,  disclosed  that  the 
number  of  home  sweatshop  workers  of  all  kinds 
in  Berlin  greatly  exceeded  100,000.  The  cloth- 
ing trade  was  "overwhelmingly"  in  the  hands 
of  the  "sweater"  or  middlemen  contractors. 
About  80  per  cent  of  the  home  workers  were 
women.  The  report,  in  1908,  of  the  British 
Board  of  Trade,  itemizing  the  results  of  this  in- 
vestigation, comments: 

"It  must  be  remembered  that  a  large  propor- 
tion of  the  home  workers  are  married  women, 
who  in  this  way  seek  to  supplement  the  earnings 
of  the  chief  bread-winner,  and  are  only  able  to 


WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN  51 

devote  odd  hours  to  the  work.  How  largely  the 
custom  of  home  working  is  a  result  of  poverty 
may  be  concluded  from  a  statement  made  in  a 
memorial  lately  addressed  to  the  Berlin  Tram- 
way Co.  by  their  employees:  "The  tramway 
employee  is  unfortunately  unable  to  dispense 
with  the  earnings  of  his  wife,  even  in  normal 
domestic  relations,  if  he  would  maintain  his 
family  properly.  The  wife  has  really  no  choice 
in  the  matter." 

Of  2,051  municipal  employees  interrogated  by 
the  Berlin  Chamber  of  Commerce,  416,  or  20.2 
per  cent,  replied  that  their  wives  worked  for 
money,  170  at  choring,  161  as  home  workers,  17 
in  factories,  and  68  in  other  ways.  And  their 
wages  1  The  most  of  them  earned  only  75  cents 
to  $1.50  a  week.  Only  25  of  the  wives  received 
more  than  $2.50  a  week. 

At  Crefeld,  the  center  of  the  German  silk 
industry,  both  husband  and  wife  have  fre- 
quently worked  in  the  factories ;  in  other  cases, 
while  the  husband  was  in  the  factory,  the  wife 
and  daughter  worked  at  home  at  the  sewing  of 
neckties. 

At  Nuremberg,  where  metal  and  toy  indus- 
tries predominate,  the  home  workers  have  for 
many  years  been  chiefly  women,  working  10  or 
12  hours  a  day,  6  days  a  week.  In  January, 


52  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

1914,  United  States  Consul  George  Nicolas  Ifft, 
at  Nuremberg,  reported  of  an  inquiry  into  the 
wages  of  unskilled  labor : 

"The  investigation  recently  completed  for 
the  city  of  Nuremberg,  one  of  the  most  import- 
ant manufacturing  centers  of  Europe,  with  a 
population  of  355,000,  shows  the  daily  wages 
paid  to  male  and  female  laborers,  in  specified 
age  groups  as  follows:  Over  21  years  of  age, 
male  88  cents,  female  50  cents ;  between  16  and 
21  years  of  age,  male  Tl^  cents,  female  45 
cents ;  under  16  years  of  age,  male  43  cents,  fe- 
male 31  cents.  These  rates  mark  an  increase  of 
about  9  per  cent  over  1910,  when  the  average 
wage  of  an  adult  unskilled  laborer  in  Nurem- 
berg was  81  cents  a  day."  (See  Daily  Consular 
and  Trade  Reports,  No.  10,  Jan.  13,  1914,  p. 
158.) 

Of  Brunswick,  the  British  Board  of  Trade  re- 
port of  1908,  based  upon  local  employers'  and 
trade-union  reports,  says:  "One  striking  fea- 
ture of  the  industrial  life  of  Brunswick  is  the 
large  amount  of  female  labor  which  is  em- 
ployed." An  investigation  made  by  the  Ger- 
man Factory  Workers'  Union,  in  1905,  into  the 
conditions  of  the  canning  factories  there, 
brought  out  the  fact  that  women  and  girls  were 
frequently  compelled  to  work  in  evil  surround- 


WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN  53 

ings  more  than  13  hours  a  day,  and  in  some 
cases  18  hours  a  day.  Even  on  Sundays  work 
was  sometimes  carried  on  for  10  or  more  hours. 
The  wages  paid  to  women  ran  from  3  to  4^ 
cents  an  hour.  The  earnings  of  home  workers 
were  found  to  be  less  than  the  wages  paid  in 
the  factories.  Consequently,  to  help  out  the 
family's  pitifully  small  income,  the  children 
were  put  at  work  in  the  evenings. 

Home  sweatshops  have  long  been  a  notorious 
feature  of  industrial  life  at  Hamburg.  Of  the 
variety  of  industries  in  that  city,  clothing  es- 
tablishments predominate.  Here,  too,  the  in- 
famous "  sweater "  or  middleman  contractor 
system  has  prevailed,  and  large  numbers  of 
workers  of  both  sexes  have  been  crowded  into 
home  shops  as  well  as  in  workshops.  The  re- 
port of  the  British  Board  of  Trade  stated  that 
as  a  result  of  an  investigation  made  by  the 
Hamburg  taxation  authorities  the  conclusion 
was  drawn  that  the  majority  of  the  population 
depended  upon  yearly  earnings  of  $247  to 
$291.60  at  the  most. 

Of  conditions  in  the  Prussian  city  of  Solingen, 
the  chief  center  of  German  cutlery  and  fine  steel 
goods  manufacture,  the  same  report  stated  (p. 
432) :  "The  evils  which  seem  inseparable  from 
home  labor  appear  in  Solingen  also — the  ab- 


54  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

sence  of  adequate  inspection,  the  excessive 
hours  of  labor  (often  a  consequence  of  the  low 
rate  of  earnings),  amounting  not  infrequently 
to  13  or  14  hours  daily,  the  unrestricted  employ- 
ment of  women  and  children  in  subsidiary  proc- 
esses, and  the  unhealthy  conditions  where,  as 
often  happens,  the  work  is  carried  on  in  the 
dwelling  rooms." 

In  January,  1911,  the  Conference  of  German 
Home  Workers  passed  a  resolution  asking  the 
German  Government  for  legislation  fixing  min- 
imum wages  for  home  workers,  so  that  in  order 
to  earn  a  living  they  would  no  longer  be  forced 
to  work  excessive  overtime.  The  German  Gov- 
ernment pigeonholed  the  petition. 

The  wages  of  women  in  Germany  have  been 
incredibly  low.  According  to  a  report  issued 
by  the  German  Imperial  Statistical  Office,  their 
average  daily  wages  in  certain  industries  in 
March,  1914,  were : 

Cents. 

Metal  industry 49 

Engineering  industry 55 

Electrical  industry 65 

Paper  industry 55 

Woodworking  industry 47 

Chemical  industry 57 


WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN  55 

Stoneworking  and  pottery  industry 41 

Food,  drink,  and  tobacco  industry 51 

Leather  and  rubber  industry 67 

It  was  largely  because  of  her  mass  of  low- 
paid  woman  labor  that  Germany  was  able  to 
produce  goods  at  such  a  paltry  cost  as  to  under- 
sell the  rest  of  the  world. 

Nowhere  in  the  world  have  textile  workers, 
many  of  whom  are  women,  been  so  shamelessly 
overworked  and  underpaid  as  in  Germany.  Bad 
enough  as  this  condition  was  before  the  war,  it 
is  now  much  worse.  The  military  machine  has 
suppressed  every  effort  of  the  textile  workers 
to  get  better  wages.  "A  mill  at  Farnau,  Ba- 
den," reported  the  Berlin  Vorwaerts,  August 
21,  1917,  "has  been  paying  for  years,  and  con- 
tinues to  pay  during  the  war,  hourly  wages  of 
8,  10,  12,  20  and  25  pfennigs  (1.9  to  6  cents). 
Even  during  the  present  year  this  firm  declined 
to  grant  any  wage  increase.  Another  mill  which 
before  the  war  did  a  world-wide  business  pays, 
for  the  manufacture  of  bagging,  linings,  and 
linen  cloth,  weekly  wages  of  5.46,  5.18,  6,  and 
8.90  marks  ($1.30,  $1.23,  $1.43,  and  $2.12)." 

Elsewhere  in  the  same  article  the  Berlin  Vor- 
waerts says:  "During  the  last  three  years  the 
textile  industry  has  reaped  large  profits.  The 


56  THE  GEEMAN  MYTH 

loss  in  production  has  been  more  than  counter- 
balanced by  the  high  prices  which  the  military 
authorities  have  paid  for  the  diminished  out- 
put. "  The  article  related  how  the  textile  work- 
ers of  Germany  had  for  some  time  made  stren- 
uous efforts  to  obtain  living  wages,  and  added : 
"So  far  these  efforts  have,  as  a  rule,  been  frus- 
trated by  the  powerful  organizations  of  the 
textile  manufacturers  whose  influence  upon  the 
military  authorities  is  so  great  that  the  war- 
arbitration  offices  and  local  war  officers  which 
are  presided  over  by  army  officers  have  not 
shown  much  consideration  for  the  demands  of 
the  textile  workers." 

It  may  be  remarked  here  that,  according  to 
the  Bremer  Burger-Zeitung,  of  Bremen,  Sept- 
ember 1,  1917,  that  by  September,  1914,  the 
average  wage  of  women  workers  in  all  groups 
of  industries  covered  had  greatly  declined. 
Then  war  costs  of  living  caused  an  increase  of 
both  men's  and  women's  wages.  By  Septem- 
ber, 1916,  this  increase  was  46  per  cent  for  the 
men  and  54  per  cent  for  the  women.  "These," 
stated  the  Bremer  Burger-Zeitung,  "are  ex- 
traordinary increases,  to  be  sure,  but  they  are 
still  quite  insufficient,  as  the  prices  of  foodstuffs 
increased  at  least  100  per  cent  during  the  same 
period." 


WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN  57 

Before  the  war  there  were  about  64,000 
women  and  girls  employed  in  the  German  metal 
trades,  working  mainly  from  9  to  10  hours  a 
day.  A  lucid  idea  of  what  militarism  brought 
to  the  German  women  and  girls  may  be  seen  in 
the  fact  that  by  April,  1916,  266,530  women  and 
girls  were  forced  into  work  in  these  trades.  So 
reported  the  Federation  of  German  Metal 
Workers  in  the  Soziale  Praxis,  Berlin,  April 
19, 1916.  The  report  gives  this  frightful  picture 
of  the  slavery  of  women  in  the  metal  trades : 

"Even  for  men,  and  still  more  for  women, 
work  at  flanging  machines  is  too  hard.  ...  At 
these  machines  projectiles  weighing  from  22  to 
82  pounds  have  to  be  lifted  breast  high  and 
clamped  to  the  bed ;  then  undamped  and  placed 
again  on  the  floor.    This  entails  a  great  physical 
strain.    In  order  to  earn  a  wage  of  3  marks  (71 
cents)  a  day  a  woman  must  perform  this  oper- 
ation 75  or  even  100  times.    The  women  com- 
plain very  much  of  abdominal  pains  caused  by 
frequently  having  to  lift  (without  any  tackle) 
shells  weighing  52  pounds."    There  was  a  fur- 
ther description  giving  almost  unbelievable  de- 
tails of  other  kinds  of  inhumanly  severe  work 
that  women  and  girls  were  compelled  to  do  in 
these  factories. 
It  was  also  an  ordinary  condition  of  peace 


58  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

times  for  women  and  children  to  do  hard  work 
in  the  coal  and  salt  mines  of  Germany.  In  1914, 
before  the  war,  7,265  women  and  31,290  juve- 
niles were  thus  employed.  For  this  work 
women  were  paid  30  cents  per  shift  and  juve- 
niles about  the  same  in  the  coal  mines. 

And  what  of  child  labor  in  Germany!  Under 
the  German  law  governing  child  labor,  children 
are  construed  to  be  boys  and  girls  under  13 
years  of  age  and  those  more  than  13  who  still 
attend  school. 

During  the  last  10  years  in  the  United  States, 
all  but  four  of  the  48  States  of  the  Union  have 
prohibited  the  employment  of  children  under 
14  years  of  age  in  factories.  Two  of  these  ex- 
ceptions are  not  manufacturing  States;  and  in 
one  of  the  States  not  having  reached  this  stand- 
ard, children  of  13  are  allowed  to  be  employed, 
and  in  the  other,  boys  12  years  of  age  are  al- 
lowed employment  in  factories,  the  employment 
of  girls  under  14  years  of  age  being  prohibited. 
Nearly  all  the  mining  States  in  the  United 
States  have  prohibited  the  employment  of  chil- 
dren under  16  years  of  age,  and  the  largest 
manufacturing  States  containing  the  greatest 
number  of  employees  prohibit  the  employment 
of  children  under  16  years  of  age  more  than 
eight  hours  a  day  or  at  night 


WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN  59 

But  on  September  1,  1917,  the  Federal  child 
labor  act,  passed  by  Congress,  went  into  ef- 
fect. This  act  prohibits  the  shipment  of  goods 
in  interstate  commerce  from  any  mine  or  quarry 
in  which  children  under  16  years  of  age  are  em- 
ployed, or  from  any  factory  or  workshop  in 
which  children  under  14  years  of  age  are  em- 
ployed, or  in  which  children  under  16  years  of 
age  are  employed  more  than  eight  hours  a  day 
or  at  night.  The  act  is  being  thoroughly  en- 
forced and  has  practically  eliminated  the  em- 
ployment of  children  below  the  ages  specified  in 
mines  and  factories. 

According  to  the  census  of  1910,  the  evils  of 
child  labor  in  factories  in  the  United  States 
had  been  so  effectively  reached  by  State  legis- 
lation that  there  were  only  150,000  children 
under  16  years  of  age  employed  in  factories  who 
were  affected  by  the  Federal  act.  This  num- 
ber has  been  considerably  reduced  by  the  time 
the  Federal  act  went  into  effect. 

The  number  of  juveniles  employed  in  Ger- 
man mines,  mills,  and  factories  was,  as  stated  in 
a  report  in  1914  by  United  States  Consul  Gen- 
eral Henry  H.  Morgan,  Hamburg,  during  1910- 
11: 

"1910— under  14  years,  7,014  boys  and  4,856 
girls;  14  to  16  years,  309,101  boys  and  167,225 


60  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

girls.  1911 — under  14  years,  7,434  boys  and 
5,970  girls ;  14  to  16  years,  332,882  boys  and  172,- 
535  girls. "  (See  Daily  Consular  and  Trade  Re- 
ports No.  130,  June  4,  1914,  p.  1287.) 

Hence,  in  1911,  there  was  a  total  of  518,821 
children  employed  in  the  mills,  mi  Ties,  and  fac- 
tories of  Germany. 

But  it  is  highly  probable  that  this  number 
does  not  by  any  means  include  the  total  num- 
ber of  children  employed.  Reporting  to  the 
Department  of  State,  in  1914,  Consul  General 
T.  St.  John  Gaffney,  in  sending  the  Saxony  sta- 
tistics, said  that  they  applied  only  to  those  es- 
tablishments in  which  at  least  10  persons  were 
employed.  If  the  number  of  children  employed 
in  all  home  shops  were  included,  the  total  would 
undoubtedly  be  much  greater. 

Of  the  518,821  juveniles  reported  thus  em- 
ployed in  Germany — 

40,799  boys  and  1,063  girls  worked  in  mines. 

29,164  boys  and  8,398  girls  worked  in  stone 
and  earth  trades. 

55,821  boys  and  12,027  girls  worked  in  metal 
trades. 

67,258  boys  and  4,917  girls  worked  on  ma- 
chinery, etc. 

35,091  boys  and  56,709  girls  worked  in  textile 
trades. 


WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN  61 

28,320  boys  and  4,575  girls  worked  in  wood 
and  wood  carving. 

9,386  boys  and  45,168  girls  worked  on  wearing 
apparel. 

Since  the  war  child  labor  in  Germany  has 
vastly  increased. 

Submissive  as  the  German  worker  has  always 
been  taught  to  be  to  the  autocracy  and  its  bu- 
reaucrats, yet  conditions  were  so  intolerable 
that  often  he  was  forced  to  strike.  Not  many 
of  these  strikes  were  successful.  From  1904  to 
1908,  according  to  the  Imperial  Statistics  Of- 
fice, there  was  an  annual  average  of  279,817 
striking  and  locked-out  workers.  From  1909  to 
1913  the  annual  average  was  327,593.  In  1914 
there  were  1,115  strikes,  of  which  only  17  per 
cent  were  wholly  successful  and  38.1  per  cent 
partially  successful.  At  least  38.5  per  cent  of 
the  strikes  were  failures. 

Backed  by  the  ruthless  police  methods  and 
the  full  weight  of  court  power,  employers  in 
Germany  have  been  easily  able  to  defeat  at- 
tempts of  the  German  workers  to  get  better 
conditions.  This  is  strikingly  shown  by  the 
data  published  in  the  German  Statistical  Year 
Book  giving  the  outcome  of  strikes  and  lockouts 
in  Germany.  In  1912  only  4.8  per  cent  of  the 
strikers  obtained  full  success  from  their  strikes, 


62  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

and  26.9  per  cent  were  partially  successful.  But 
68.3  per  cent,  or  more  than  two-thirds  of  the 
strikers,  had  to  return  to  work  without  having 
had  any  success  whatever. 

How  greatly  defeated  the  German  strikers 
have  been  is  more  fully  seen  when  these  figures 
are  compared  to  those  pertaining  to  strikes  and 
lockouts  in  other  countries.  The  same  author- 
ity— the  German  Statistical  Year  Book — shows 
that  in  Great  Britain  and  Ireland  in  the  same 
year  74.5  per  cent  of  the  labor  conflicts  ended 
with  full  victory  for  the  strikers;  in  11.1  per 
cent  of  the  strikes  the  strikers  obtained  partial 
success;  and  14.3  per  cent  of  the  strikes  were 
failures.  In  1912  in  Belgium  45.3  per  cent  of 
the  strikes  were  successful  and  23.8  per  cent 
unsuccessful.  In  Holland  27.5  per  cent  of  the 
strikes  were  successful  and  32.4  per  cent  were 
failures. 

These  are  some  of  the  things  that  have  gone 
on  in  Germany  where,  the  writer  of  a  current 
pretentious  book  claims,  "  Property,  business, 
and  industry  are  regulated  in  the  public  inter- 
est'* and  where  there  is  "industrial  and  social 
equality. ' '  But  there  are  many  other  iniquities. 
The  facts  as  to  these  have  been  easily  obtain- 
able, but  in  their  aim  to  present  Germany  as 
the  model  nation  of  the  world,  the  eulogists  have 


WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN  63 

refused  to  state  them,  as  they  have  declined  to 
give  all  other  facts  that  would  hurt  their  spe- 
cial pleading. 


CHAPTER  V 

WRETCHED  HOUSING  CONDITIONS 

WHAT  have  been  the  living  conditions  of  the 
mass  of  German  men,  women  and  children! 

The  German  Government  never  deceived  it- 
self on  this  question.  Its  governmental  and 
municipal  census  reports  showed  exactly  what 
those  conditions  have  long  been.  But  it  did  de- 
ceive American  writers  and  official  inquirers 
who  made  their  jaunts  to  Germany.  It  de- 
ceived them  with  showy  exhibits  of  "model 
dwellings"  and  with  alluring  stories  of  what 
a  noble  benefactor  the  German  Government  had 
been  to  its  working  people.  These  exhibits  bore 
the  same  relation  to  the  housing  of  the  mass  of 
German  people  as  a  few  endowed  "model  tene- 
ments" bore  to  the  immense  bulk  of  ordinary 
tenement  houses  in  New  York  City  before  the 
passage  of  the  modern  tenement-house  laws  15 
years  ago.  In  the  wordy  products  stimulated 
by  the  German  Government  the  entire  space  is 
given  to  an  enumeration  of  these  German 

64 


HOUSING  CONDITIONS  65 

' '  model  laws ' '  and ' '  model  dwellings. ' '  Most  of 
these,  by  the  way,  have  been  designed  for  the 
benefit  of  the  army  of  German  officials  and 
petty  officials. 

But  the  vital  question  as  to  how  the  many 
millions  of  the  German  working  people  actually 
lived  has  been  altogether  ignored  in  this  cam- 
paign of  publicity. 

To  have  given  the  facts  would  not  have  looked 
nice  for  German  ''efficiency." 

Germany  has  been  vaunted  as  the  originator 
of  a  housing  reform.  The  fact  is  that  it  has 
been  a  cheap  imitator,  and  a  backward,  inferior 
one  at  that.  As  early  as  1831  France  appointed 
a  Commission  on  Workingmen's  Dwellings. 
Housing  reform  projects  in  Great  Britain  began 
in  1841-1851,  and  the  important  movement  in 
1882.  In  the  United  States  housing  reforms 
were  agitated  as  long  ago  as  1829.  They,  as 
well  as  other  reforms,  would  have  made  far 
greater  progress  had  it  not  been  that  public  at- 
tention was  long  absorbed  by  the  overshadow- 
ing issues  of  the  Civil  War  and  the  problems 
that  came  after  it. 

The  German  so-called  housing  movement 
dates  from  1884.  It  made  up  in  braggadocio 
what  it  lacked  in  sincerity  and  effectiveness. 
For  two  years  a  noisy  splurge  was  made  of 


66  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

doing  something.  It  is  on  the  reputation  of  that 
splurge  that  Germany  has  been  traveling  ever 
since.  The  fiction  was  spread  that  slums  had 
been  abolished.  But  the  German  landlords 
knew  that  the  slums  had  been  merely  trans- 
ferred out  of  casual  sight  from  the  front  to 
the  rear.  They  knew  because  they  have  increas- 
ingly profited  from  the  shocking  overcrowding 
in  the  mass  of  rear  tenements  in  many  German 
cities.  To  impress  visitors  the  German  Gov- 
ernment veneered  the  outward  aspect. 

Since  1886  very  little  in  the  adoption  of  im- 
proved housing  measures  had  been  done  in  Ger- 
many. In  the  United  States  the  most  far-reach- 
ing and  comprehensive  housing  laws  have  been 
passed  in  many  States ;  in  fact,  a  revolution  in 
that  respect  has  taken  place  in  the  laws  here  in 
the  last  20  and  25  years.  In  England,  since  1875, 
millions  of  pounds  were  spent  by  municipali- 
ties in  effacing  slums;  and  in  1914,  before  the 
war,  Lloyd-George  proposed  a  comprehensive 
scheme  of  housing  reform.  This  has  become  a 
matter  of  national  policy  in  Great  Britain  and 
comprehends  the  building  of  possibly  1,000,000 
houses  at  a  cost  estimated  to  exceed  $1,000,000,- 
000.  In  other  countries  great  changes  have 
been  made.  But  with  the  exception  of  some 
minor  building  regulations  adopted  by  some  of 


HOUSING  CONDITIONS  67 

the  German  States,  housing  laws  in  Germany 
stand  mnch  where  they  did  early  in  1887. 

And  why?  Mainly  because  under  the  elec- 
tion-law system  concentrating  the  effective 
voting  power  in  the  rich,  the  city  councils  have 
long  been  composed  chiefly  of  landlords  and 
land  and  building  speculators.  They,  as  a  mat- 
ter of  course,  have  constantly  opposed  any 
real  housing  reforms  for  the  working  mass. 

Year  after  year  the  German  Society  of  Hous- 
ing Reform  pressed  a  proposed  housing-reform 
law  for  Prussia  and  for  Germany.  But  neither 
the  majority  of  the  Prussian  Legislature  or  the 
German  Parliament  could  be  budged. 

The  real  housing  reform  demanded  in  1887 
has  not  been  provided  for  in  legislation  up  to 
the  present  time.  The  horrible  conditions  in 
which  the  mass  of  German  workers  have  lived 
have  been  fully  known  to  German  legislators. 
The  Junkers  and  industrial  lords  (most  of 
whom  are  intermarried  with  the  military  caste) 
controlling  the  lawmaking  bodies  have  refused 
to  act. 

On  January  25,  1913,  the  old  housing-reform 
bill  that  every  year  had  been  (making  allowance 
for  later  modifications)  brought  forth  since 
1887  was  again  introduced  in  the  Prussian  Leg- 
islature. The  bill's  preamble,  giving  the  gen- 


68  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

eral  motives  of  the  measure,  stated  with  refer- 
ence to  the  large  cities  and  to  all  those  industrial 
towns  which  showed  a  rapid  increase  in  popu- 
lation : 

"In  these  localities  many  people  live  in  rooms 
so  small  and  so  lacking  in  privacy  that  neither 
the  requirements  of  hygiene  nor  of  family  can 
be  met.  Dwellings  for  people  of  limited  means 
are  often  so  unsatisfactory  and  insanitary  as 
to  be  entirely  unfit  for  permanent  occupation. 
The  supply  of  small  apartments  is  insufficient 
and  rents  are  frequently  out  of  all  proportion 
to  the  incomes  of  the  wage  earners.  As  a  result 
overcrowding  is  common,  and  so  is  the  practice 
of  taking  lodgers.  The  risks  of  thus  introduc- 
ing strangers  into  a  crowded  family  life  are  well 
known.  .  .  .  People  of  small  means  must  either 
satisfy  themselves  with  apartments  wholly  in- 
adequate to  their  needs,  or  if  they  can  not  find 
these  and  must  take  larger  ones,  they  are 
obliged  to  make  up  the  rent  by  keeping  board- 
ers or  lodgers." 

The  full  details  of  this  bill  are  set  forth  in 
Soziale  Praxis  and  Archiv  fur  Volkswohl- 
f  art,  Berlin,  1913,  Vol.  XXII,  p.  513. 

It  need  hardly  be  added  that  the  bill  did  not 
pass.  Characteristic  it  is  that  the  rulers  who 
have  refused  the  German  workers  this  reform 


69 


are  those  that  for  more  than  fonr  years  have 
been  trying  to  introduce  "German  kultur"  into 
Belgium  by  devastating  and  terrorizing  that 
country.  Yet  Belgium  is  the  very  country  that 
by  its  laws  of  1889  developed  novel  ideas  of 
housing  reform  that  later  served  as  a  pattern 
for  French  and  Italian  legislation. 

Save  in  a  few  large  American  cities,  where 
apartment  houses  in  certain  sections  are  the 
rule  for  the  working-class  families,  the  work- 
ers in  the  United  States  live  in  private  houses. 
The  single  house  predominates,  with  a  certain 
number  of  two-family  and  three-family  houses. 
The  family  of  a  skilled  and  usually  the  unskilled 
American  worker  lives  by  itself.  It  has  privacy, 
plenty  of  room,  and  all  modern  conveniences. 
The  general  standard,  except  in  some  parts  of 
the  largest  cities,  is  high. 

There  is  no  attempt  here  to  ignore  the  fact 
that  in  some  of  these  large  cities  there  is  much 
more  to  be  done  in  correcting  conditions.  But 
the  point  is  that  taking  the  United  States  as 
a  whole  compared  to  Germany  as  a  whole,  hous- 
ing conditions  in  this  country  are  far  superior 
to  those  in  Germany. 

In  New  York  City  the  changes  brought  about 
in  the  last  15  years  have  been  so  striking  that 
in  1913  Dr.  Nemenyi,  of  Budapest,  who  was  sent 


70  THE  GEEMAN  MYTH 

by  the  Hungarian  Government  to  study  Ameri- 
can housing-reform  methods  declared: 

"New  York's  tenement  laws  and  their  en- 
forcement have  no  parallel  anywhere  in  Europe. 
New  York's  handling  of  the  tenement  problem 
is,  to  European  eyes,  unique,  admirable,  impres- 
sive. Conditions  in  the  worst  of  your  tenements 
are  vastly  better  than  in  the  worst  of  Europe's. 
Your  tenements,  as  a  whole,  are  far  better  than 
those  of  Europe,  while  your  slums  are  not 
nearly  as  bad  as  those  of  many  cities  in  Eu- 
rope. Of  course,  there  are  tenement  houses  and 
building  laws  in  Hungary  and  Europe  gener- 
ally, but  they  are  not  such  laws  as  you  have. 
They  do  not  protect  the  health  and  lives  of 
dwellers  in  the  tenements  as  do  yours,  and  it  is 
for  this  reason  that  Hungary  wishes  to  revise 
her  laws  along  American  lines. ' ' 

"German  kultur"  is  only  across  the  border. 
But  Hungary's  commissioner  had  to  come  to 
the  United  States  to  find  good  tenement-house 
laws.  While  the  "survey"  dilettanti  have  been 
going  to  Germany  and  boosting  Germany's 
"model  housing"  after  their  return,  the  practi- 
cal housing  reforms  of  Europe  have  looked  to 
the  United  States  for  laws  and  plans  as  a  model 
for  European  legislation. 

Throughout  Germany  the  "barrack"  tene- 


HOUSING  CONDITIONS  71 

ment  house  is  the  usual  living  quarters  for  the 
mass  of  workers,  skilled  and  unskilled.  In 
nearly  all  places  it  has  been  the  rule  to  build 
these  "barracks"  in  series  of  blocks  one  behind 
the  other,  not  visible  from  the  ornate  street 
fronts.  Often  a  row  of  half  a  dozen  of  them  in 
back  streets  grimly  abut  one  another  only  30 
or  40  feet  apart  and  from  three  to  five  or  six 
stories  high.  The  courtyards  and  rooms  are 
accordingly  enshrouded  in  gloom,  and  the  ven- 
tilation is  bad.  The  street  exteriors,  overloaded 
with  ornamentation,  impress  visitors  who  forth- 
with conclude  that  all  within  is  in  fine  order. 

The  sordid  interiors  of  these  "barracks," 
however,  are  anything  but  inviting.  The  rooms 
are  small  and  unrelieved  by  any  of  those  adorn- 
ments, appurtenances,  and  fixtures  usual  to  the 
American  apartment  or  house.  Hideous  in  its 
stark  bareness  is  the  room  in  which  the  German 
worker  must  exist.  Likewise  so  in  its  lack  of 
conveniences.  Bath  facilities  in  working-class 
districts  in  general  are  a  rarity.  So  are  heated 
apartments.  The  family  must  provide  its  own 
stove  and  supply  its  own  heat.  In  many  places 
the  sanitary  arrangements  are  on  the  landings, 
and  their  use  is  shared  by  from  four  to  eight 
families.  In  old  sections — and  they  are  numer- 
ous— water  has  to  be  carried  from  the  yards. 


72  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

German  official  statistics  have  a  high-sound- 
ing way  of  describing  all  living  places  as 
" dwellings."  A  one-room  flat  is  thus  held  to 
be  a  "dwelling."  The  German  official  notion 
of  what  constitutes  overcrowding  is  large  and 
elastic.  In  official  statistics  a  "dwelling"  in 
Germany  has  been  only  considered  overcrowded 
in  which  there  have  been  6  or  more  persons  liv- 
ing in  a  single  heatable  room  or  11  or  more  per- 
sons in  a  "dwelling"  with  two  heatable  rooms. 

Why  have  the  German  authorities  been  so 
generous  in  their  definition  of  overcrowding? 
Because  the  great  mass  of  workers  are  so  pov- 
erty stricken  that  they  could  not  possibly  pay 
the  rents  demanded  if  they  did  not  take  board- 
ers or  lodgers.  In  Germany  be  it  remembered, 
rents  do  not  include  taxes.  Overcrowding  in  liv- 
ing quarters  is  one  of  the  few  things  in  Germany 
that  is  not  *  *  verboten ' '  ( forbidden) .  Nominally 
the  police  have  strict  rules,  but  on  tacit  orders 
from  "higher  up"  they  ignore  overcrowding. 
But  in  most  places  the  playing  of  children  in  the 
courtyards  is  severely  prohibited. 

The  study  of  the  cost  of  living  of  wage-earn- 
ing families  published  in  1909  by  the  Imperial 
Statistical  Office  of  Germany  showed  that  one- 
fourth  of  the  families  investigated  derived  part 
of  their  income  from  the  subletting  of  rooms. 


HOUSING  CONDITIONS  73 

Were  it  not  for  this  widespread  practice  of  tak- 
ing in  lodgers,  great  numbers  of  German  work- 
ers wonld  have  to  face  dispossession,  and  the 
ranks  of  ontright  paupers  would  be  enormously 
swelled. 

For  years  an  astounding  number  of  Berlin's 
habitations  of  working  people  have  been  one 
and  two-room  flats.  The  Berlin  census  of 
1900  showed  that  a  total  of  96.7  per  cent  of  that 
city's  population  lived  in  rented  " dwellings " — 
mostly  tenements  of  the  notorious  "barrack" 
type.  Of  412,713  tenement  flats  in  Berlin — 

37,369  were  of  one  room. 

175,163  were  of  two  rooms. 

143,744  were  of  three  rooms. 

56,197  were  of  four  rooms. 

And  what  were  the  housing  conditions  10 
years  later?  In  the  main  they  had  not  im- 
proved. True,  the  number  of  three-room  flats 
had  greatly  increased,  but  so  had  the  number  of ' 
lodgers  huddled  with  the  family  in  these  rooms. 
The  Berlin  housing  census  of  1910,  the  results 
of  which  were  officially  published  in  1913,  re- 
ported of  Berlin — 

That  there  were  555,416  "dwellings"  hous- 
ing a  population  of  1,996,994  persons. 

That  40,690  "dwellings"  consisted  of  one 
room. 


74  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

That  186,756  consisted  of  two  rooms. 

That  180,850  consisted  of  three  rooms. 

That  62,676  consisted  of  four  rooms. 

The  comparatively  small  remainder  of  five  to 
seven  rooms. 

That  34,508  "dwellings"  had  no  kitchen  at 
all. 

That  in  41,115  households  roomers  were  kept. 

That  in  58,400  households  lodgers  (renting 
beds  by  the  night)  were  taken  in. 

That  a  total  of  64,031  regular  roomers  and 
88,560  regular  lodgers  were  kept.  (Many  fam- 
ilies, it  may  be  added,  have  concealed  the  fact 
that  they  kept  lodgers.) 

The  preponderance  of  working  people,  the 
Berlin  housing  census  of  1910  showed,  were 
chiefly  herded  in  one  and  two-room  habitations. 
These  workers  were  not  unskilled  laborers. 
They  were  largely  skilled  workers. 

In  his  volume  "My  Four  Years  in  Germany," 
James  W.  Gerard,  U.  S.  Ambassador  to  Ger- 
many up  to  the  war,  says  that  "over  55  per 
cent  of  the  families  in  Berlin  are  families  liv- 
ing in  one  room."  German  writers  on  housing 
conditions  in  Berlin  state  that  45  per  cent  of 
the  fa-mi  lies  in  Berlin  have  been  living  in  one 
room. 

s 

The  two-room  flat  has  remained  the  predomi- 


HOUSING  CONDITIONS  75 

nant  working-class  type  of  housing  in  Berlin 
and  in  many  other  German  cities.  These  two 
rooms  are  made  up  of  a  combination  living  and 
bedroom  occupied  day  and  night  throughout  the 
year,  and  the  other  room  a  small  kitchen  which 
likewise  is  pressed  into  service  as  a  bedroom. 
In  these  stuffy  rooms  there  will  commonly  be 
found  a  family  of  four  to  six  persons  and 
boarders  or  lodgers  besides.  Often  the  husband 
and  wife  (and  children,  if  they  have  any)  sleep 
in  the  kitchen  and  the  other  room  is  let  to  lodg- 
ers. Frequently,  also,  the  two  rooms,  when 
work  is  done  at  home,  are  used  as  a  work- 
shop. 

In  recent  years  the  Berlin  worker  has  had  to 
give  up,  on  the  average,  the  earnings  of  about 
56  days  (of  a  total  of  300)  for  rent  payment. 
In  addition  to  rent,  all  German  workers  with 
incomes  of  $225  or  more  a  year  have  had  to  pay 
local  taxes  and  State  income  taxes. 

In  Stuttgart,  Magdeburg,  Solingen,  Munich, 
Elberfeld,  Barmen,  Dusseldorf,  Dantzig,  Chem- 
nitz, Breslau,  and  many  other  German  cities 
housing  conditions  in  working-class  districts  are 
essentially  similar  to  those  in  Berlin.  There  is 
a  large  number  of  one-room  flats  and  a  great 
proportion  of  two-room  flats. 

In  many  places  from  more  than  one-fourth 


76  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

to  more  than  one-half  of  the  population  is  com- 
pressed into  one  and  two-room  flats. 

In  Dusseldorf ,  in  1910,  more  than  one-quarter 
of  working-class  abodes  were  two-room  habi- 
tats or  less.  In  some  parts  of  Dusseldorf  the 
block-behind-block  "barrack"  system  is  not  to 
be  found,  but  nevertheless  the  workers  have 
been  packed  together  in  many  sections.  Bremen 
is  not  a  "barrack"  city.  Stuttgart,  too,  has  not 
had  this  kind  of  "barrack"  construction,  but 
according  to  the  latest  available  census  (that  of 
1905)  more  than  one-half  of  the  workers' 
"dwellings"  were  of  two  rooms.  In  Leipsic 
and  Hamburg  the  three-room  flat  has  been  the 
usual  workers'  living  place;  these  cities,  how- 
ever, have  been  among  the  exceptions,  and  as 
sweatshops  abound,  particularly  in  Hamburg, 
the  fact  of  one  more  room  generally  means  no 
additional  comfort. 

Apart  from  a  very  few  places,  the  block-be- 
hind-block housing  has  been  the  prevailing  rule 
in  Germany. 

In  Munich  the  municipal  house  bureau  census 
a  few  years  ago  showed  that  no  less  than  nearly 
29  per  cent  of  the  entire  population  of  539,000 
lived  in  one  and  two-room  tenement  flats. 

Almost  11,000  of  the  17,717  working-class  ten- 
ements in  Magdeburg  were  rear  tenements — 


HOUSING  CONDITIONS  77 

that  is  to  say,  tenements  behind  tenements. 
Many  were  slums  that  did  not  appear  to  be 
slums  because  they  were  hidden  from  exterior 
view. 

Dantzig  has  long  been  notorious  for  its  malo- 
dorous tenements  in  the  old  part  of  the  city. 
The  spiral  staircases  in  many  of  these  holes 
have  long  been  so  dark  that  tenants  in  going  up 
and  down  have  had  to  use  a  rope  to  feel  their 
way.  These  foul  quarters  have  been  fertile 
breeding  places  for  roughs  and  gangs.  Yet  for 
25  years  German  officials  have  brazenly  denied 
that  there  were  slums  in  Germany,  and  the  rest 
of  the  world  has  been  credulous  enough  to  be- 
lieve their  fabrications.  In  the  newer  sections 
of  Dantzig  the  tenements  are  of  the  flimsiest 
construction,  and  this  in  a  region  where  the  cli- 
mate is  exceptionally  severe.  Fully  44  per  cent 
of  the  working-class  habitations  in  Dantzig  have 
consisted  of  one  room  and  a  kitchen. 

In  Breslau  one-half  at  least  of  the  renting 
population  has  lived  in  two  rooms  or  less.  In 
a  report  of  an  investigation  made  by  it  some 
years  ago  the  Association  of  Local  Sick  Funds 
complained  of  damp  cellar  flats,  dark  and  win- 
dowless  rooms,  absence  of  ventilation  and  heat- 
ing arrangements,  of  beds  shared  by  sick  and 
well,  and  of  overcrowding  of  the  worst  kind. 


78  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

The  much  glorified  Essen,  ruled  over  by  the 
Krupps,  has,  for  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  cen- 
tury, been  conspicuously  advertised  through- 
out the  world  as  a  " model  housing  place." 
Quite  true,  the  Krupps  did  build  a  certain  num- 
ber of  "model  houses."  But  these  have  been 
mostly  occupied  by  officials.  The  living  quar- 
ters of  the  mass  of  workers  were,  however,  not 
advertised.  For  good  reasons.  The  municipal 
census  of  1905  showed  that  65.4  per  cent,  or 
nearly  two-thirds  of  all  of  the  tenement  flats  in 
Essen,  were  of  two  or  three  rooms.  Nearly  39 
per  cent  consisted  of  two  rooms.  Here,  as  else- 
where in  Germany,  the  practice  has  been  fairly 
general  of  taking  in  boarders  or  lodgers. 

And  here  it  may  be  said  that  the  housing  done 
by  private  corporations  or  by  the  Government 
in  Germany  represented  not  only  a  small  but 
diminishing  share  of  the  accommodation  needed 
by  workers  in  proportion  to  the  greatly  in- 
creased population  in  industrial  cities. 

The  report,  in  1910,  of  the  British  Labor 
Party  and  Trade  Union  Commission  declared 
(p.  61)  after  a  thorough  investigation  of  con- 
ditions in  Germany,  that  in  the  German  indus- 
trial cities  visited  the  "German  workingman 
is  paying  more  for  his  two  miserably  small 
rooms  than  the  Lancashire  worker  is  paying  for 


HOUSING  CONDITIONS  79 

his  little  cottage  of  four  or  five  rooms  with  back 
yards  and  conveniences. ' ' 

Housing  conditions  at  the  outbreak  of  the 
war  were  even  worse  in  Germany  than  in  the 
previous  years.  Kents  had  acutely  increased 
in  previous  years,  and  this  inevitably  led  to 
worse  overcrowding.  Yet  the  eulogists,  with  a 
characteristic  suppression  of  facts,  have  been 
telling  the  American  people  that  it  is  because 
of  the  German  Government's  watchful,  tender 
care  for  the  comfort  of  its  working  people  that 
the  German  workers  have  been  so  loyal  to  their 
Government. 


CHAPTER  VI 

CHBONIC    UNDERFEEDING   AND    GREAT   INFANT 
MOETALITY 

THE  conditions  already  described  as  to  how 
the  many  millions  of  Germany's  working  men, 
women,  and  children  have  had  to  toil  and  exist 
are  but  a  few  of  the  long-prevailing  abomina- 
tions. 

Behind  the  doors  of  the  workers'  paltry 
households,  so  called,  underfeeding  has  been 
persistently  chronic.  Year  by  year  as  rents  and 
other  costs  of  living  increased  it  grew  even 
worse.  Had  it  not  been  for  the  practice  of  rent- 
ing bunks  to  roomers  and  lodgers  the  fate  of 
many  a  worker's  family  would  have  been  one 
perilously  near  starvation.  Accompanying  this 
overcrowding,  undernourishment  and  other 
conditions,  there  has  gone  on  for  years  the  most 
appalling  scourge  of  infant  mortality  known  in 
any  country  in  the  world  except  Austria  and 
Russia.  Preceding  Germany's  massacres  in 
this  war  was  her  practical  massacre  of  the  in- 
nocents within  her  own  borders. 

80 


CHEONIC  UNDERFEEDING          81 

Visitors  were  encouraged  to  look  at  the  pretty 
parts  of  cities,  and  at  broad  avenues  and  what 
seemed  to  be  festive  music  halls.  But  they  were 
never  officially  conducted  into  the  grim  precincts 
of  the  "  barrack "  tenements,  and  if  some  of 
them  did  venture  into  these  quarters  they  gave 
no  evidence  of  having  tried  to  find  out  what 
actually  went  on  there. 

The  family  budget  of  the  average  German 
workman's  family  has  been  one  of  such  monoto- 
nous meagerness  that  it  would  drive  the  Ameri- 
can worker  and  housewife  to  despair.  Notwith- 
standing the  fact  that  in  Germany,  as  we  have 
seen,  husband,  wife,  and  children  often  work 
out  or  in  home  sweatshops,  the  combined  earn- 
ings of  all  have  been  so  scanty  that  they  could 
not  afford  to  buy  enough  elemental  food  or  a 
sufficient  variety.  Foods  that  have  been  neces- 
saries to  the  American  worker  have  been  lux- 
uries to  the  German.  The  study  of  wage-earn- 
ing families  in  Germany  made  public  by  the 
German  Imperial  Statistical  Office  in  1908 
showed  accurately  on  what  small  nourishment 
the  German  worker  has  been  compelled  to  sub- 
sist. 

The  average  skilled  worker's  family  in  Ger- 
many has  not  been  able  to  afford  veal,  chops, 
steaks  and  other  kinds  of  meat.  Its  meats  have 


82  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

been  mainly  ham,  bacon,  pork,  and  sausage  com- 
pounds. During  the  entire  year  it  could  buy 
only  79  cents  worth  of  meat  a  week,  and  about 
26  cents  worth  of  sausage  weekly.  Fish, 
whether  fresh  or  smoked,  has  been  a  rare  lux- 
ury; what  the  family  spent  for  fish  during  the 
year  amounted  to  about  7  cents  a  week.  About 
36  cents  worth  of  butter  nominally  had  to  do  for 
the  family  for  the  week  but,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
many  German  workers'  families  hardly  even 
have  had  butter  on  their  table ;  they  spread  their 
rye  bread  with  suet,  oleomargarine,  and  often 
with  lard. 

Seldom  have  eggs  come  on  the  table ;  the  en- 
tire expenditure  for  the  year  for  eggs  amount- 
ing to  about  12  cents  a  week.  The  average  fam- 
ily could  not  afford  more  than  about  7  to  8  cents 
a  week  for  cheese  which,  by  the  way,  is  a  favor- 
ite German  food.  It  had  to  get  along  with  15 
or  16  cents  worth  of  potatoes,  and  10  to  11  cents 
spent  for  vegetables,  a  week.  Sugar  and  fruit 
have  not  been  common  to  the  average  working- 
class  family  in  Germany ;  and  if  it  did  buy  these 
articles  it  did  not  spend  more  the  year  round 
than  11  cents  a  week  for  sugar,  sirup,  and  honey, 
and  about  12  cents  a  week  for  fruit.  For  flour, 
rice,  and  similar  foods  the  weekly  bill  averaged 
less  than  13  cents  a  week.  For  coffee  and  coffee 


CHEONIC  UNDERFEEDING          83 

substitutes  (chiefly  the  latter)  its  bill  was  re- 
stricted to  about  12  cents  a  week.  Not  quite  4 
cents  a  week  covered  its  weekly  bill  for  tea, 
chocolate,  and  cocoa.  Its  expenses  for  milk 
were  held  down  to  a  little  more  than  45  cents 
a  week,  and  for  bread  and  pastry  to  about  75 
cents  a  week. 

These  were  the  main  food  expenses.  The 
principal  diet  articles  of  the  skilled  worker 's 
family  in  Germany  during  peace  times  were 
swine  products,  potatoes,  bread  and  pastry  and 
milk.  About  14  cents  a  week  was  the  outlay  for 
drinks,  and  less  than  10  cents  a  week  for  cigars 
and  tobacco.  These  and  incidentals  brought 
the  average  expenditure  of  the  skilled  worker 's 
family  for  foods  to  $230.65  a  year.  The  un- 
skilled worker's  family  fared,  of  course,  much 
worse. 

The  difference  in  costs  of  foods  between  Ger- 
many and  the  United  States  was  not  nearly  as 
great  as  has  been  commonly  represented.  For 
the  same  low  standard  of  living  it  amounted  to 
about  17  to  20  per  cent  less  in  Germany. 

But  a  clearer  idea  of  the  underfeeding  of  the 
German  worker  is  shown  by  a  comparison  of 
what  the  average  workman  in  Germany  in  1907 
consumed  and  what  the  average  adult  male  in 
the  United  States  in  1903  consumed  in  certain 


84 


THE  GERMAN  MYTH 


specified  articles  of  food.  These  statistics  are 
from  official  sources,  in  the  one  case  from  the 
records  of  the  German  Imperial  Statistical  Of- 
fice ;  in  the  other  from  the  report  of  the  United 
States  Bureau  of  Labor : 

United 

German  States 

workman,  adult  male, 

1907,  1903- 

Meats,  pounds 60.63  185.19 

Poultry,  pounds 19.44 

Butter,  pounds 16.31  30.13 

Other  fats,  pounds 13.23  22.50 

Fish,  pounds 20.46 

Cheese,  pounds 8.38  4.38 

Eggs,  dozen 23.48 

Potatoes,  pounds 202.82  240 

Coffee,  pounds 6.83  13.37 

Milk,  quarts 111.90  103.71 

Sugar,  pounds 69.75 

Tea,  pounds 3.13 

Molasses,  gallons 1.06 

Flour  meal,  pounds 166.25 

Eice,  pounds 7.90 

t 

Inasmuch  as  the  figures  as  to  adult  males  in 
the  U.  S.  investigation  of  1903  applied  to  wage- 
earning  families  and  did  not  include  the  well- 
to-do,  the  above  is  a  fair  comparison. 


CHRONIC  UNDERFEEDING          85 

But  the  statistics  of  the  German  Imperial 
Statistical  Office  do  not  by  any  means  reveal 
the  whole  grnesome  story. 

They  do  not  tell,  for  example,  of  the  great 
consumption  of  horseflesh  or  the  use  of  dogflesh 
by  the  working  people  before  the  war.     For 
many  years  there  has  been  a  considerable  mar- 
ket for  horseflesh  in  many  German  cities.    In 
at  least  five  German  cities  dog  slaughter  houses 
were  officially  recognized.     The  police  regula- 
tions have  required  the  slaughtering  of  horses 
and  dogs  in  special  abattoirs  and  the  sale  of 
horse  and  dog  flesh  in  special  shops,  where  the 
meat  and  the  sausage  "  delicacies "  made  from 
it  have  had  a  brisk  sale.    Much  of  this  horse- 
flesh, as  investigations  showed,  was  diseased. 
In  Berlin  from  11,000  to  14,000  horses  were 
slaughtered  yearly  before  the  war  for  the  Ber- 
lin horseflesh  markets.     In  Munich,  Bremen, 
Hamburg,  Dresden,  Leipsic,  Elberfeld,  Dussel- 
dorf,  Essen,  Crefeld,  and  many  other  German 
cities  horseflesh  and  products  made  from  it 
have  been  a  staple  in  increasing  demand.    The 
abattoirs  have  been  either  in  the  cities  or  in  the 
rural  districts,  and  the  horseflesh  and  dogflesh 
butchers  have  been  conspicuous  in  the  indus- 
trial centers. 

The  insufficiency  and  poor  quality  of  food, 


86  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

however,  do  not  complete  the  picture  of  the 
German  worker's  dire  subsistence.  Those  who 
have  worshipped  German  "efficiency"  have 
carefully  avoided  looking  into  the  facts  as  to 
the  widespread  and  flagrant  adulteration  of 
foods  in  Germany.  Basing  its  facts  upon  the 
reports  of  Prussian  state  officials,  the  Zeit- 
schrift  fuer  oeffentliche  Chemie  published  in 
1914  a  description  of  some  of  these  adulteration 
methods.  The  facts  narrated  in  that  publication 
were  transmitted  by  United  States  Consul  Gen- 
eral J.  I.  Brittain  at  Coburg  and  republished 
in  the  Daily  Consular  and  Trade  Reports,  No. 
145,  June  22, 1914.  The  Zeitschrift  fuer  oeffent- 
liche Chemie  reported: 

"The  use  of  artificial  butter  grows  from  year 
to  year;  it  is  even  being  used  in  the  country. 
In  spite  of  this  increasing  consumption,  there 
is  much  uncleanliness  where  it  is  produced,  and 
there  is  great  necessity  for  purifying  the  raw 
products  used.  Tallow  is  often  confiscated  be- 
cause it  contains  hair,  flies,  splinters,  and  other 
foreign  substances.  The  manufactured  butter  is 
also  sometimes  confiscated  because  it  contains 
a  large  percentage  of  soda.  Margarine  manu- 
facturers are  still  using  benzoic  acid  and  sul- 
phuric acid  as  preservative  agents.  Up  to  the 
present  the  penalty  for  using  such  adulterants 


CHRONIC  UNDERFEEDING          87 

has  not  been  clearly  defined  because  the  law  has 
not  been  properly  explained.  Mixtures  of  lard, 
beef  fat,  and  artificial  fats  are  often  made. 
Vegetable  fats  are  being  more  and  more  used, 
especially  in  the  form  of  hardened  oils. 

''Flour  and  bakery  products  also  need  care- 
ful supervision,  because  of  the  mixture  of  in- 
ferior products,  sand,  weed  seeds,  and  mites. 
In  many  districts  it  has  been  found  that  talcum 
was  used  to  adulterate  flour,  and  that  there  was 
uncleanliness  in  the  storerooms  and  in  the  man- 
ner of  manufacture.  Mites,  worms,  and  spiders 
were  found  in  the  flour  bins.  So-called  egg  mix- 
tures often  resemble  eggs  only  in  color,  and 
that  is  given  by  a  coal-tar  product.  Fruit  juices 
are  also  artificially  colored — often  with  poison- 
ous coloring  matter. 

"In  a  sparkling  fruit  wine  advertised  as  free 
from  alcohol,  7  per  cent  of  alcohol  was  found. 
The  green  color  of  canned  vegetables  was  found 
frequently  to  be  the  result  of  the  use  of  salts 
of  copper.  In  1  kilo  (2.20  pounds)  132  grams 
(4.65  ounces)  of  copper  salts  were  found.  Mar- 
malade and  fruit  jellies  were  found  often  to 
consist  almost  entirely  of  artificial  ingredients. 
Coffee  was  most  frequently  adulterated  with 
pulse  or  lupine  seeds. 

"In  many  instances  malt  coffee  was  found 


88  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

to  be  simply  unmalted,  roasted  barley.  Adul- 
terated vinegar  is  said  to  have  caused  two 
deaths.  Wines  were  less  impure,  owing  to  the 
strict  supervision  exercised  over  the  wine  in- 
dustry, but  in  the  manufacture  of  beer  much  is 
to  be  desired  in  the  matter  of  cleanliness.  Twice 
brandy  was  found  to  be  adulterated  with  methyl- 
ated spirits.  Lead  was  also  used  for  coloring 
utensils  and  vessels  in  daily  use.  A  substance 
advertised  for  nickel  was  found  to  consist  of  a 
strongly  poisonous  quicksilver  solution.  In  a 
baby's  rubber  nipple  40  per  cent  of  zinc  was 
found. ' ' 

The  adulteration  of  candy  made  in  Germany 
and  sold  throughout  Germany  was  carried  on 
shamelessly  with  the  callous  absence  of  regard 
for  human  health,  morals,  and  life  characteristic 
of  the  German  official  code.  Quoting  from  the 
Massigheits-Blatter,  which  gave  the  alcoholic 
contents  of  certain  liquor  candies  manufactured 
in  Cologne,  Hamburg,  Berlin,  and  Wittenberg, 
Vice  Consul  General  Ernest  L.  Ives,  at  Frank- 
fort-on-Main,  reported  in  the  Daily  Consular 
and  Trade  Eeports  No.  179,  August  1,  1914: 
"Reduced  to  percentages,  the  alcoholic  content 
of  the  different  candies  is  as  follows :  Cologne, 
5.28  per  cent ;  Hamburg,  2.14 ;  Berlin,  4.04 ;  Wit- 
tenberg, 3.4.  Ordinary  beers  contain  2.16  to 


CHRONIC  UNDERFEEDING          89 

3.2  per  cent  of  alcohol,  while  the  Bavarian 
beers  contain  4  per  cent  and  the  English  beers 
and  ales  over  5  per  cent.  The  liquor  candy 
manufactured  in  Cologne  contains  more  alcohol 
than  the  strongest  beer." 

Such  exposures  as  these  did  not  interest  rul- 
ing German  officialdom,  which,  of  course,  was 
the  military  caste.  The  whole  training  of  this 
caste  was  for  the  slaughter  not  the  saving  of 
human  life.  At  this  very  time  the  military  caste 
was  industriously  and  jubilantly  putting  the 
final  touches  to  its  preparations  for  the  war  that 
it  well  knew  it  would  soon  seize  a  pretext  for 
declaring. 

An  exceedingly  tender  subject  to  German 
officials  has  always  been  that  of  Germany's  in- 
fant mortality.  They  avoided  discussing  it  and 
distracted  attention  from  both  it  and  its  causes. 

German  propagandists  filled  America  with 
effusive  accounts  of  the  "  innumerable  clinics, 
krippen,  milk  stations  and  institutions  for  indi- 
gent mothers  in  Germany. ' J  They  thus  dissemi- 
nated the  idea  that  "extraordinary  Germany'* 
was  the  originator  of  child-saving  agitation  and 
measures,  and  that  it  was  a  "wonderfully  effi- 
cient" country  where  health  was  high  and 
people  were  happy. 

What  they  did  not  say  was  that  France 


90  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

started  the  world-wide  movement  to  reduce  in- 
fant mortality  more  than  a  centnry  before  Ger- 
many wakened  np  to  it.  And  what  they  did  not 
tell  or  care  to  tell  were  the  simple  figures  of 
infant  mortality  in  Germany.  These  wonld  have 
completely  spoiled  their  gorgeous  propaganda. 
The  German  official  figures  alone  would  have 
shown  that  the  number  of  infant  deaths  in  Ger- 
many has  been  continuously  and  incredibly 
large — higher  than  in  any  other  registered  coun- 
try in  ftie  world  except  European  Russia  and 
Austria. 

It  was  in  1786 — before  the  French  Revolution 
— that  the  child-saving  movement  was  begun  in 
France  by  the  founding  of  the  Societe  de 
Charite.  This  is  the  same  institution  that  in 
1910  aided  30,000  poor  married  mothers  during 
confinement.  Other  such  French  institutions 
came  into  being  in  1836  and  1844.  Babies '  milk 
stations  were  established  in  France  nearly  25 
years  ago.  France  was  the  originator,  yet  Ger- 
many and  its  boosters  have  boldly  claimed  the 
credit  for  this  movement  (as  they  have  of  nearly 
everything  else)  for  "German  Kultur." 

Look,  if  you  please,  at  the  eloquent  figures 
given  here,  and  see  what  "German  Kultur"  has 
done  to  its  infants.  The  figures  are  official  and 
are  those  of  deaths  under  one  year  of  age  per 


CHRONIC  UNDERFEEDING          91 
100   births,    and   an    average    for    1910-1914: 

Russia  (European)  24.6 

Austria 19.7 

German  Empire 17.0 

Prussia 16.6 

Spain 16.5 

Bulgaria 16.1 

Japan   15.7 

Italy 14.7 

Belgium   14.1 

France 11.0 

England  and  Wales 10.9 

Scotland 10.9 

Switzerland 10.9 

Holland 10.4 

Denmark 9.9 

Sweden 7.6 

Norway 7.0 

For  years  there  has  been  an  enormous  infant 
death  rate  in  German  cities.  The  1912  report  of 
the  Prussian  medical  department,  ministry  of 
the  interior,  reported  (p.  9)  that  the  infant 
death  rate  per  1,000  of  living  children  was,  in 
the  year  1912:  Berlin,  178;  Danzig,  203;  Bres- 
lau,  203;  Magdeburg,  202;  Posen,  212;  Dussel- 
dorf,  146;  Hanover,  132. 


92  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

These  are  some  typical  infant  death  rates 
in  German  cities.  If  any  American  city,  at  this 
time  and  age,  were  to  show  death  rates  even 
approaching  those  of  many  German  cities,  there 
would  be  an  upheaval  and  drastic  steps  would 
be  taken  to  remedy  matters.  The  infant  death 
rate  in  American  cities  having  white  popula- 
tions is  a  low  one.  It  would  be  still  lower  were 
it  not  for  the  fact  that  in  many  large  American 
cities  there  is  a  heterogeneous,  polyglot  element 
of  the  foreign  population  to  educate  which  in 
health  matters  takes  much  time  and  consider- 
able expense.  There  is  no  such  difficulty  in 
Germany,  the  population  of  which  has  been 
homogeneous.  Despite  its  variegated  popula- 
tion, New  York  City's  infant  death  rate  in  1912 
was  only  105  per  1,000  births.  Boston's  was 
110.  Cincinnati's  was  only  103.  If  in  any 
American  city  with  a  preponderant  white  popu- 
lation the  infant  death  rate  now  reaches  125 
or  130,  per  1000  births,  the  situation  is  re- 
garded as  an  alarming  one.  Yet  in  Germany 
the  usual  infant  death  rate  in  many  cities  has 
for  years  ranged  from  130  to  258. 

Why  has  the  infant  death  rate  been  so  ab- 
normally high  in  Germany?  Germans  have 
boasted  of  their  laws  prohibiting  the  use  for 
infants  of  milk  not  pasteurized.  But,  in  the 


CHRONIC  UNDERFEEDING          93 

first  place,  neither  they  nor  the  other  acclaim- 
ers  of  German  " efficiency"  have  ever  told  the 
real  reason  why  these  laws  were  adopted.  The 
fact  is  that  so  general  in  Germany  has  been  for 
years  the  condemnation  of  women  to  severe 
drudgery  that  vast  numbers  of  them  lost  the 
power  to  nourish  their  babies.  The  Berlin  sta- 
tistics, prepared  by  Breckhs,  showed  that  only 
one-seventh  of  all  of  the  infant  deaths  reported 
were  those  of  breast-fed  babies,  while  the  re- 
maining six-sevenths  were  those  of  bottle-fed 
babies.  Needing  the  men  for  its  military  ma- 
chine, the  German  autocracy  was  not  disposed 
to  do  anything  that  would  release  girls  and 
women  from  hard  labor  in  fields,  mines,  fac- 
tories, and  shops.  Consequently  it  did  the  next 
best  thing,  which  was  to  decree  the  use  of  pas- 
teurized milk — a  measure  that  had  some  effect 
in  saving  babies  for  its  war  machine  while  at 
the  same  time  giving  the  German  rulers  the 
reputation  of  being  a  "marvellous  social  reform 
government. ' ' 

Ordinarily  the  use  of  pasteurized  milk  for 
infants  ought  to  bring  about  a  great  decrease  in 
the  number  of  infant  deaths.  Its  increasing  use 
in  the  United  States  has  produced  an  immense 
transformation  in  this  respect,  because  other 
conditions  are  good  here.  But  in  Germany  the 


94  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

milk  laws  have  been  far  offset  by  a  militarist- 
feudal-industrial  system  which  in  peace  times 
drove  nearly  10,000,000  women  to  hard  work, 
exiling  many  of  them  from  their  children  while 
they  did  the  most  strenuous  labor  such  as  only 
men  are  normally  qualified  to  do  and  should  do. 
The  same  system  has  grossly  underfed  and 
foully  housed  the  mass  of  German  working  men, 
women,  and  children. 

These  are  the  main  causes  of  the  terrific  in- 
fant mortality  which  for  years  has  accursed  the 
German  people.  The  statistics  for  the  city  of 
Leipzig  have  shown  that  in  rooms  containing 
three  or  more  occupants  there  was  an  adult 
death  rate  three  times  greater  than  in  rooms 
with  one  occupant,  and  for  children  under  one 
year  of  age  a  death  rate  four  times  greater  than 
in  rooms  with  one  occupant.  The  average  num- 
ber of  persons  to  a  house  or  "dwelling"  in  Ber- 
lin a  few  years  ago  was  46.6  as  compared  with 
13.7  in  New  York  City,  8.8  in  Chicago,  8.4  in 
Boston,  6.3  in  Pittsburgh,  and  5.4  in  Philadel- 
phia. In  Leipzig  and  Dresden  there  have  been 
more  than  27  persons  to  a  house ;  in  Elberf eld, 
Barmen,  and  Essen  more  than  18 ;  in  Dusseldorf 
more  than  19 ;  in  Hanover  20 ;  in  Chemnitz  more 
than  29;  and  in  Breslau  more  than  39.  These 
figures  of  themselves  graphically  present  the 


CHRONIC  UNDERFEEDING          95 

hideous  housing  congestion  throughout  Ger- 
many. 

In  its  investigation  in  1910  of  "Life  and 
Labor  in  Germany,"  the  British  Labor  Party 
and  Trade  Union  Commission  inquired  into  the 
astounding  infant  mortality  rate.  Reporting 
that  in  the  town  of  Gera,  for  example,  during 
the  10  years  1898  to  1907,  inclusive,  more  than 
30  per  cent  of  the  children  born  died  before 
they  reached  1  year  of  age,  the  commission 
proceeded  to  review  the  infant  mortality  in 
Germany 's  textile  industrial  centers  as  a  whole. 
Its  report  continued  (p.  60) : 

"And  the  reasons  given  to  us  for  this  phe- 
nomenal state  of  things  were: 

"1.  The  fact  that  wages  are  so  low  that  the 
wife  is  obliged  to  go  to  the  mill  to  help  keep 
the  house  going. 

"2.  That  prices  of  necessities  are  so  high 
that  a  sufficient  amount  can  not  be  purchased, 
especially  of  meat,  to  keep  the  mother  in  a  state 
of  physical  efficiency. 

"3.  That  a  considerable  number  of  the  chil- 
dren are  handed  over  to  the  care  of  neighbors 
or  older  children,  and  lose  the  close  attention 
of  the  mother,  who  returns  to  the  factory  as 
soon  after  confinement  as  possible. 

*  *  Perhaps  the  principal  reason  has  been  over- 


96  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

looked  by  the  Germans  themselves.  From  the 
number  of  workmen's  homes  we  visited  and  the 
inquiries  we  made,  it  is  safe  to  assume  that  the 
average  textile  worker's  family  is  housed  in 
two  small  rooms,  measuring  12  feet  by  9  feet, 
in  a  high  building  of  5  or  6  stories.  It  is  the 
exception  rather  than  the  rule  for  a  worker  to 
have  three  of  these  rooms,  unless  he  has  other 
members  of  the  family  working ;  and  the  stuffi- 
ness of  these  rooms  can  be  better  imagined  than 
described,  when  the  family  is  all  present." 


CHAPTER 


THE  LABGE  EXTENT  OF  PAUPERISM 

THE  climax  of  falsehoods  that  the  German 
Government  succeeded  in  imposing  upon  the 
American  people,  as  well^s  upon  other  peoples, 
was  the  claim  that  there  was  little  or  no  paup- 
erism in  the  German  Empire. 

The  idea  that  pauperism  was  about  extinct  in 
Germany  became  more  than  impression.  It 
settled  in  the  minds  of  many  people  here  into 
such  a  fixed  belief  that  even  after  war  was  de- 
clared by  the  United  States  a  prominent  So- 
cialist in  Minnesota  in  a  public  speech  there 
said,  in  effect  :  "What  if  the  Germans  do  come 
over  here  and  rule  us?  What  do  we  care  who 
governs  us  so  long  as  we  are  well  fed  and 
happy?" 

He  was  simply  voicing  what  others  who  had 
imbibed  German  propaganda  were  saying  in 
private.  They  had  absorbed  so  much  of  the 
praise  of  the  German  Government's  schemes  for 
the  prevention  of  poverty  that  they  took  it  for 

97 


98  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

granted  that  those  schemes  were  both  genuine 
and  successful. 

The  unusually  significant  fact  that  the  Ger- 
man Government  neither  published  nor  appa- 
rently had  any  comprehensive  statistics  of  paup- 
erism in  Germany  was  unnoticed.  Here  was  a 
potent,  fact  that  instantly  should  have  aroused 
suspicion.  Endlessly  had  the  German  Govern- 
ment bragged  of  its  thoroughness  and  excel- 
lence in  gathering  the  most  minute  statistical 
details  about  anything  and  everything.  Why 
did  it  or  its  States  not  have  the  full  facts  on 
pauperism,  or  if  it  had  them  why  did  it  not 
publish  them!  Had  there  been  such  a  big 
omission  in  the  United  States  the  German  critics 
would  have  been  the  first  to  raise  an  outcry 
about  official  incapacity  or  denounce  official 
suppression  of  important  facts.  In  Germany 
there  was  much  greater  reason  than  here  for  the 
systematic  assembling  and  complete  publication 
of  pauperism  data.  If  there  was  little  or  no 
pauperism  there,  as  the  claim  was,  the  yearly 
statistics  for  a  given  period  ought  to  have 
shown  it,  and  the  German  Government,  it  might 
reasonably  be  expected,  would  be  only  too  eager 
to  publish  them.  Even  to  the  most  unsophis- 
ticated mind  the  fact  that  the  German  Govern- 
ment avoided  the  subject  ought  to  have  opened 


PAUPERISM 

up  sharp  suspicions  that  it  was  trying  to  con- 
ceal something  of  great  importance. 

German  officials  knew  well  enough  that  paup- 
erism statistics  had  a  greater  significance  than 
any  other  kind.  These  statistics  were  the  real 
test  of  Germany's  boastings.  And  why?  For 
several  reasons.  If  conditions  in  Germany  were 
as  ideal  as  they  were  represented,  pauperism 
should  have  become  nonexistent.  If,  also,  Ger- 
many's compulsory  social  insurance  schemes 
had  been  so  successful  as  they  were  lauded  in 
the  vaunted  object  of  removing  poverty,  the 
statistics  would  have  shown  the  gradually  di- 
minishing number  of  paupers,  year  by  year. 

Well-informed  Germans  knew  that  there  was 
plenty  of  pauperism.  They  knew  that  much  of 
it  was  downright  destitution,  and  that  much 
more  was  the  same  but  disguised  from  super- 
ficial view  by  palliative  coverings.  But  the 
mass  of  Germans  were  effectively  chloroformed 
by  the  Government.  With  every  motion  of  their 
life  regulated,  their  beliefs  and  views  were  also 
regulated.  When  they  were  told  to  believe  that 
everything  was  going  on  happily  and  harmoni- 
ously and  that  the  compulsory  social  insurance 
laws  were  a  great  benevolence  and  benefit  the 
most  of  them  believed  it.  Officially  assured  that 
pauperism  thereby  had  been  immensely  reduced 


100  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

they  believed  this,  too,  accepting  the  official 
word  against  the  evidence  of  their  own  observa- 
tion and  experience.  Their  national  pride 
was  flattered  by  this  agreeable  misinforma- 
tion. 

Enongh  authentic  facts,  and  more  than 
enough,  are  available  from  authoritative  Ger- 
man sources  on  the  actual  status  of  pauperism 
in  Germany. 

Germany's  compulsory  sickness  and  working- 
men's  accident  insurance  system  dates  from 
1883-84;  its  invalidity  and  old-age  insurance 
from  1889.  The  main  convincing  argument  used 
in  adopting  these  compulsory  schemes  was  that 
the  powerful  intervention  of  the  State  was  nec- 
essary to  force  people  to  submit  to  measures 
that  would  protect  them  against  want. 

If  these  laws  had  brought  about  this  end,  or 
nearly  so,  impressive  results  would  certainly 
have  shown  by  the  year  1910.  By  that  time 
these  as  well  as  other  so-called  "reform"  laws 
had  been  in  force  long  enough.  That  was  the 
crest  of  the  time,  too,  when  all  over  the  world 
the  legend  had  been  adroitly  disseminated  that 
Germany  was  a  veritable  paradise  where  con- 
tentment dwelt  and  bliss  crowned  all. 

Turning  from  legend  to  fact  what  do  we  find  ? 

That  instead  of  decreasing,  pauperism  in  Ger- 


PAUPERISM  101 

many  had  increased,  not  only  absolutely  but 
relatively. 

In  1912  there  was  held  an  international  con- 
vention composed  of  men  to  whom  the  prepa- 
ration of  statistics  was  a  life  passion.  This 
gathering  was  called  "The  Fifteenth  Interna- 
tional Congress  on  Hygiene  and  Demography" 
— a  formidable  title,  sufficiently  dry  to  insure  its 
proceedings  against  reportorial  curiosity.  But 
although  the  voluminous  papers  read  there  were 
not,  to  be  sure,  reported  in  the  press,  they  were 
published  in  full  in  the  regular  volume  issued  by 
that  congress  in  1913. 

One  of  the  delegates  to  this  international 
congress  was  Dr.  Friederich  Zahn,  director  of 
the  Bavarian  Royal  Statistical  Office,  Munich, 
Germany.  Dr.  Zahn  is  the  greatest  authority  in 
Germany  on  poor  relief  in  that  country.  He  had 
spent  a  lifetime  exploring  records  of  German 
municipalities  and  compiling  the  statistics  of 
his  own  State  of  Bavaria.  In  the  paper  that  he 
read  on  "Workingmen's  Insurance  and  Poor 
Relief  in  Germany,"  Dr.  Zahn  gave  the  solid 
facts  including  many  tables  of  statistics,  dry, 
perhaps,  yet  having  an  eloquence  that  nothing 
else  on  the  subject  could  so  convincingly 
impart. 

What  of  the  German  cities  about  the  "ele- 


102  THE  GEKMAN  MYTH 

gance"  and  "  well-being "  of  which  so  much  had 
been  written?  Dr.  Zahn  drew  the  deceptive  cur- 
tain aside  and  showed  these  conditions  behind 
the  scenes: 

Berlin. — The  number  of  persons  receiving 
poor  relief  from  the  public  funds  had  increased 
yearly  from  31,358  in  1891  to  55,601  in  1909. 
This  was  an  increase  in  pauperism  from  1.99 
per  100  inhabitants  in  1891  to  2.64  per  100  in- 
habitants in  1909.  Pauper  burials  were  fre- 
quent. 

Hamburg. — Pauperism  was  so  constant  a 
state  that  from  1895  to  1909  between  9,000  to 
10,000  persons  annually  were  given  poor  relief 
from  the  public  funds.  Many  paupers  were 
buried  at  public  expense  every  year. 

Munich. — Here  the  number  of  publicly  re- 
lieved paupers  more  than  doubled  in  five  years. 
The  number  receiving  public  alms  rose  from 
11,133  in  1895  to  25,187  in  1909.  The  expense  of 
this  poor  relief  nearly  tripled  in  this  period 
although  the  population  had  increased  less  than 
one-third  (from  395,000  to  560,000).  Pauper 
burials  were  numerous. 

Leipsic. — A  steady  army  of  paupers.  About 
7,500  persons  a  year  received  public  poor  relief 
from  1905  to  1909.  Many  pauper  burials. 

Breslau. — Nearly  10,000  persons  a  year  had 


PAUPERISM  103 

to  apply  to  the  public  authorities  for  alms  from 
1905  to  1909.  Poor-relief  expense  greatly  in- 
creased dnring  this  period,  although  the  popu- 
lation (about  475,000)  remained  fairly  station- 
ary. Every  year  pauper  burials  went  on. 

Frarikfort-on-tJie-Main. — An  average  of  about 
2,500  destitutes  had  yearly  to  get  poor  relief 
from  the  public  authorities  in  the  years  1905- 
1908.  Poor-relief  expenses  increased  almost  a 
third  from  1905  to  1909,  while  the  population 
increased  only  one-tenth  (332,000  to  369,000). 
Here,  too,  pauper  burials  were  a  regular  feature. 

Nuremburg. — A  big  increase  in  paupers.  The 
number  getting  public  alms  rose  annually  from 
9,030  in  1900  to  14,496  in  1908.  During  that 
period  the  growth  in  population  was  propor- 
tionately much  less— from  257,706  to  316,400. 
A  considerable  number  of  paupers  were  yearly 
buried. 

Dusseldorf. — The  number  of  down-and-outs 
getting  public  poor  relief  almost  doubled  in  10 
years.  In  1900  public  alms  were  given  to  6,966. 
Year  after  year  the  number  of  almsgetters  in- 
creased. In  1909  a  total  of  11,700  got  poor  re- 
lief. The  expense  in  this  period  had  more  than 
doubled,  but  the  population  during  the  same  time 
had  increased  less  than  one-fourth.  The  ex- 
pense for  burying  paupers  constantly  increased. 


104  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

Elberfeld. — Here,  also,  pauperism  was  a 
chronic  condition,  with  little  or  no  variations. 
A  yearly  average  of  1,250  destitutes  received 
public  alms  from  1880  to  1909.  During  that  time 
the  public  expense  for  poor  relief  bounded  from 
545,000  marks  in  1880  to  954,756  marks  in  1910. 
A  part  of  it  went  for  pauper  burials.  Elber- 
feld 's  population  increased  from  93,000  in  1880 
to  170,000  in  1909. 

The  foregoing  statistics  do  not  by  any  means 
give  the  poor-relief  totals  in  the  large  German 
cities  named.  These  totals  could  be  ascertained 
only  by  a  complete  register  of  all  of  the  poor 
helped  out  by  private  as  well  as  by  public  alms. 
Then,  in  addition,  is  the  list  of  those  destitute 
who  never  applied  to  either  public  or  private 
agencies  but  were  assisted  by  relatives  or 
friends  or  by  trade-union  or  other  benefit  or- 
ganizations. 

In  extenuation  of  these  pauper  conditions  the 
excuse  can  not  be  advanced  that  it  is  only  in 
the  large  German  cities  that  pauperism  was  to 
be  found.  The  statistics  presented  by  Dr.  Zahn 
show  that  it  was  a  common,  general  condition 
throughout  Germany,  in  small  as  well  as  in  large 
cities.  The  46  German  cities  in  the  list  below 
ran  from  Berlin  with  its  more  than  2,000,000 
inhabitants  to  Plauen,  Erfurt,  Mayence  and 


PAUPERISM  105 

others  each  with  barely  more  than  100,000  popu- 
lation. 

The  actnal  total  public  expenditures  of  all 
kinds  for  paupers  and  orphans  in  46  German 
cities  in  the  fiscal  year  1910  were : 

Per  capita 
expenditure. 

City.                        Expenditure,  1910.      1907  1910 

Marks.              Marks.  Marks. 

Berlin 15,651,325              6.44  7-56 

Hamburg 7,709,240               7.53  8.28 

Munich 3,178,798               4.67  5-33 

Leipzic  3,868,567              7.22  6.56 

Dresden  3,305,722               5.07  6.03 

Cologne 3,321,212  ....  6.43 

Breslau    2,107,812               3.49  4.12 

Frankfort-on-Main    ....      3,085,527               6.62  7.45 

Dusseldorf    1,811,947               5.71  5.05 

Nuremberg 1,340,687              3.46  4.02 

Charlottenburg    2,137,281               5.88  6.08 

Hanover 1,408,183               4.32  4.74 

Essen   1,228,104              3.67  4.17 

Chemnitz 884,483               3.17  3.07 

Stuttgart  1,191,062               5.68  4.16 

Madgeburg 1,114,466               4.56  3.09 

Konigsberg 1,041,324               4.61  4.23 

Bremen    1,683,007               5.58  6.87 

Bixdprf   598,884              2.09  2.52 

Stettin    976,192              3-59  4-13 

Duisburg  829,318               3.41  3.61 

Dortmund  1,032,903               3.40  4.86 

Kiel 1,079,219               6.23  5.10 

Mannheim 1,215,263               5.32  6.27 

Halle 842,104               4.14  4.66 

Strassburg    886,753               3.12  4.96 

Schoneberg 581,123               2.41  3.36 

Altona    839,497               4-57  4-86 

Danzig  891,740               4.60  5.23 

Elberfeld 954,756               4.80  5.61 

Gelsenkirchen    456,851               2.17  2.69 

Barmen    596,284               3.38  3.52 

Posen  865,674              4.46  5.52 

Aachen 1,090,036             5.93  6.98 


106  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

Per  capita 
expenditure. 
City.  Expenditure,  1910      1907  1910 

Cassel 557,733  2-92  3-66 

Braunschweig    685,005  3.71  4.77 

Bochum  505,513  3-02  3.69 

Karlsruhe   580,902  2.55  4.33 

Crefeld    659,777  4-23  5-«> 

Plauen   303498  2.50 

Erfurt    337,055  3-02  3-O2 

Mayence    503,819  4-55 

Wilmersdorf    213,833  1.42  1.95 

Wiesbaden    495,953  3-66  4.55 

Saarbrucken    394,282  3.75 

Augsburg    430,927  ....  4-21 

Judging  by  German  standards  of  expendi- 
tures these  were  enormous  amounts.  They  were 
also  merely  the  public  sums,  not  the  total  of  all 
amounts  variously  spent  in  relieving  destitu- 
tion. Even  as  public  sums  they  did  not  include 
the  entire  public  costs;  in  the  case  of  some 
cities  certain  costs  such  as  the  care  of  sick  paup- 
ers in  hospitals  are  not  included  in  the  list  here 
given.  As  they  stand,  however,  the  sums  item- 
ized were  obviously  great,  and  this  for  pauper 
conditions  which,  it  was  popularly  supposed 
elsewhere,  did  not  exist  within  the  blessed  pre- 
cincts of  the  Kaiser's  imperial  proprietary  do- 
minions. 

The  large  number  of  paupers  in  the  one  Ger- 
man State  of  Bavaria  alone  gives  a  clear  insight 
into  what  conditions,  as  a  whole,  in  Germany 
must  have  been  up  to  the  war's  outbreak.  Ba- 


PAUPERISM:  10? 

varia  is  one  of  the  few  German  States  which 
does  keep  a  comprehensive  statistical  record  of 
paupers  and  of  every  factor  connected  with 
pauperism.  Bavaria,  too,  is  the  richest  agri- 
cultural State  in  the  German  Empire.  Accord- 
ing to  the  table  prepared  by  Dr.  Zahn  this  is  the 
record — and  only  a  partial  one  at  that — of 
pauperism  as  officially  registered  in  Bavaria : 

Poor  relief  in  Bavaria. 

Number  relieved  ("exclud-  Expenditures  per 

Year.                    ing  other  members  of  head  of 

the  family").  population. 
Marks. 

1900    189,484  1.5 

1901 200,265  1.5 

1902    202,555  1.6 

1903    205,649  1.6 

1904    201,695  1.7 

1905    200,334  1-7 

1906    199,029  1.8 

1907    198,277  1.8 

1908    215,438  2.0 

1909     235,269  2.1 

1910     239,696  2.1 

I9H     230,218  2.1 


Of  this  extensive  partial  list  of  persons  re- 
ceiving poor  relief  in  Bavaria,  more  than  one- 
half  received  "permanent  relief,"  the  remain- 
der * '  temporary  relief. ' '  From  1900  to  1909  the 
number  "permanently  relieved"  in  Bavaria 
varied  from  17  to  18  per  1,000  inhabitants. 


108  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

The  increase  in  expenditures  for  poor  relief 
in  Bavaria  is  here  shown: 

Per  too 

Year.  Total  inhabitants. 

Marks.  Marks. 

1807  9,442,955  I59-I 

1900  10,368,387  168.6 

1902  11,286,433  178.9 

1904  12,199,398  188.7 

1906  13,296,000  202.3 

1908  15,266,000  227.0 

1911  17,460,000  252.1 

The  total  amount  in  public  funds  spent  for 
poor  relief  in  Bavaria  in  the  whole  of  the  10 
years  1897-1906  was  111,375,955  marks  (about 
$26,000,000). 

Not  only  in  the  large  and  small  cities  of  Ger- 
many has  outright  destitution  been  continuous 
but  also  in  the  rural  regions.  In  the  rural  sec- 
tions of  Germany,  as  in  the  cities  of  that  coun- 
try, the  expenditures  for  poor  relief  constantly 
rose  year  after  year,  as  these  statistics  for  cer- 
tain districts  given  by  Dr.  Zahn  show: 

Cost  of  rural  poor  relief. 

Year.                               Westphalia.  Rhenish  Prussia. 

Marks.  Marks. 

1886 .-      300,000  611,000 

1890 330,400  700,000 

1895 491,600  1,006,000 

1900 615,700  1,349,000 

1905 835,800  1,510,000 

1906 817,300  1,504,000 

1007 895,100  1,583,000 

1008 984,000  1,715,000 

1909 1,034,650  1,697,000 


PAUPERISM  109 

Of  these  public  sums  spent  for  poor  relief  in 
these  two  rural  districts  alone,  an  increasing 
amount  went  year  after  year  for  the  support 
of  the  rural  poor  in  institutions.  Thus  in  1886 
less  than  one-fourth  of  the  total  costs  in  West- 
phalia was  applied  to  care  of  paupers  in  insti- 
tutions, the  bulk  going  to  out-door  poor  relief. 
From  1905  onward  two-thirds  or  more  of  the 
costs  of  poor  relief  had  to  be  applied  to  the 
care  of  paupers  in  institutions.  Part  of  this 
increase  is  explainable  by  the  greater  cost  of 
supplies,  but  the  bulk  was  a  sheer  increase  of 
per  capita  expenditure. 

When  it  is  considered  that  for  many  years 
the  movement  of  Germany's  population  was 
from  the  rural  regions  to  the  cities,  it  can  be 
seen  at  once  that  these  increases  in  poor  costs 
in  the  rural  districts  were  out  of  all  proportion 
to  the  population.  For  example,  as  illustrating 
this  cityward  movement:  In  1882  there  were 
15  large  cities  in  the  German  Empire  with  a 
population  of  3,400,000,  or  7.6  per  cent  of  the 
total  population;  in  1907  there  were  42 
large  cities  with  11,790,000  inhabitants,  or 
19.1  per  cent,  not  including  the  populous  sub- 
urbs. 

The  explanation  of  economic  depression  may 
account  for  an  increase  in  poor  relief  in  certain 
years,  but  it  does  not  account  for  the  chronic 


110  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

prevalence  of  pauperism  both  in  periods  of  de- 
pression and  prosperity.  The  years  1907-1909 
were  a  period  of  economic  depression  in  Ger- 
many, but  in  the  preceding  years,  which  were 
estimated  as  those  of  national  prosperity, 
pauperism  kept  on  in  general  growing  with 
ominous  steadiness.  This  increase  in  pauperism 
went  on  contemporaneously  with  the  assumption 
of  increased  power  by  the  German  State,  and 
with  the  increased  power  of  German  trade 
unions,  consumers'  distributive  organizations 
and  of  so-called  rural  credit  organizations.  It 
was  during  the  very  period  when  Germany's  so- 
called  social  reform  laws  were  enacted  and  when 
they  were  supposed  to  have  had  a  cumulative 
effect  that  pauperism  in  Germany  so  greatly  in- 
creased. 

Brag  the  German  Government  has  of  its 
" enlightened"  and  "civilized"  treatment  of  its 
working  people.  But  the  stern  fact  has  been 
that  any  workman  so  reduced  as  to  have  to  beg 
for  alms  has  been  automatically  deprived  by 
law  of  even  the  paltry  civil  rights  that  he  had, 
and  that  same  law  branded  him  with  a  distinct 
social  as  well  as  political  odium  from  which  he 
could  never  recover. 

Although  some  German  States  (but  only  as 
late  as  1910)  modified  the  severity  of  the  laws 
imposing  disabilities  upon  those  soliciting  or 


PAUPERISM  111 

getting  poor  relief,  yet  German  law  as  a  whole 
still  harshly  penalizes  the  unfortunates  driven 
into  poverty.  Everywhere,  it  is  true,  poverty  is 
stigmatized,  but  in  a  country  such  as  the  United 
States  no  law  discriminates  against  it,  and  no 
obstacles  are  put  in  the  way  of  the  sufferers 
to  prevent  them  from  breaking  from  its  meshes. 
In  Germany,  however,  poverty  is  in  law  a  pe- 
culiarly heinous  disgrace.  The  impoverished 
loses  even  the  shadowy  voting  rights  that  he 
had.  He  is  prohibited  from  voting  in  the  Em- 
pire, in  the  State,  in  the  Commune,  or  even  in 
the  Church.  He  is  debarred  from  serving  as  a 
juror  and  in  all  other  civil  capacities.  He  is 
shorn  of  even  the  ordinary  rights  of  settling 
anywhere.  Nowhere  are  the  poor  allowed  any 
voice  in  the  management  of  the  communal  and 
the  provincial  poor  unions.  And  such  degrada- 
tions as  the  law  does  not  otherwise  impose  upon 
the  poor,  a  rigid  caste  system  and  cruel  social 
custom  do.  The  modern  humanitarian  concept 
that  poor  relief  is  a  general  kindly  duty  of  so- 
ciety to  be  administered  with  consideration  has 
hardly  penetrated  Germany. 

No  destitute  person  in  Germany  can  get  even 
the  mite  of  poor  relief  allowed  without  being 
first  subjected  to  a  gruelling,  terrifying  inquisi- 
tion. Every  detail  of  the  applicant's  private 


112  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

affairs  is  probed  into  and  exposed  by  a  search- 
ing, antagonistic  inquiry  that  destroys  all  self- 
respect  and  humiliates  all  spirit.  The  suppli- 
cants' faces  and  bodies  may  be  emaciated;  they 
may  be  staggering,  from  hunger  and  exhaustion, 
but  such  evidence  is  never  accepted.  They 
must  undergo  a  multitude  of  formalities  and 
prove,  point  by  point,  that  they  are  in  need  and 
can  not  supply  essential  needs.  Until  they  have 
run  this  ordeal  of  an  inflexible  officialdom  no 
relief  is  given.  The  same  officials  who  brow- 
beat the  poor  cringe  before  the  aristocracy  and 
are  rewarded  for  doing  both. 

In  order  to  conciliate  the  organized  city  work- 
ing people  and  at  the  same  time  to  give  a  genteel 
outward  appearance  to  city  conditions,  the 
usual  form  of  poor  relief  in  the  cities  has  been 
that  of  grants  of  money.  The  individual  sums 
thus  given  have  been — well,  what  have  they 
been?  Commonly  about  $1.50  a  month  or  there- 
abouts ;  sometimes  a  little  more.  A  $3  or  $4  a 
month  allowance  of  alms  has  been  considered 
generosity.  In  official  parlance  these  poor  re- 
lief grants  are  sonorously  styled  "benefits." 
Miserable  as  are  these  sums  they  have  somehow 
been  the  means  of  diverting  a  mass  of  paupers 
from  being  shifted  to  almshouses.  Hidden  in 
the  congested  byways  and  festering  in  the 


PAUPERISM  113 

squalid  back  neighborhoods  of  the  cities,  these 
impoverished  semblances  of  human  beings  have 
mysteriously  existed.  Meanwhile  the  officials, 
well  knowing  that  these  submerged  elements 
have  been  lost  to  view,  have  proudly  pointed  out 
to  visitors  the  delusive  fact  that  their  alms- 
house  population  is  almost  nil. 

But  in  the  rural  districts,  where  the  art  of 
disguising  disagreeable  facts  has  not  yet  been 
learned,  the  methods  of  dealing  with  paupers 
are  the  reverse.  Here  the  old  attitude  toward 
the  pauper  has  survived  in  all  its  naked  bru- 
tality. If  the  down-and-out  has  been  known 
and  liked  the  village  people  have  helped  him  or 
her  out  by  supplies  contributed  by  them  in  rota- 
tion. But  if  paupers  have  happened  to  be  from 
some  other  place  in  Germany,  which  has  often 
been  the  case,  they  have  been  unceremoniously 
consigned  to  the  almshouse.  And  of  all  things, 
country  people  object  to  individual  grants  of 
money  because  it  means  a  direct  assessment  on 
them,  already  overburdened  as  they  have  been 
by  taxes. 

These  are  facts  that  German  propagandists 
carefully  concealed.  Glossing  over  almshouse 
pauperism  in  Germany  by  professing  never  to 
have  seen  any  marked  evidences  of  it,  they  at 
the  same  time  distributed  implications  upon  the 


114  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

growth  of  pauperism  in  the  United  States.  In 
Germany  they  avoided  consulting  statistics.  In 
the  United  States  they  did  nibble  at  them  but 
only  at  such  parts  as  fitted  their  purposes.  One 
phase  of  a  fact  such  as  that  the  number  of  alms- 
house  paupers  in  the  United  States  had  in- 
creased from  73,045  in  1900  to  84,198  in  1910 
would  be  stretched  to  a  sweeping  claim  that 
pauperism  in  America  had  increased.  If  the 
other  phase  of  the  same  fact,  however,  had  been 
considered,  the  result  became  a  very  different 
one.  This  other  phase  was  that  per  100,000  of 
population  the  proportion  of  almshouse  paupers 
in  the  United  States  had  decreased  from  116.6 
in  1900  to  91.5  in  1910. 

Moreover — and  a  highly  important  fact  it  is 
— much  of  this  pauperism  was  pauperism  trans- 
planted here  direct  from  Europe.  United 
States  Bureau  of  the  Census  Bulletin  120 
("Paupers  in  Almshouses")  further  shows 
(p.  49)  that  of  the  84,190  paupers  admitted  to 
almshouses  in  the  United  States  in  1910,  a  total 
of  33,353  were  foreign-born  white  paupers, 
5,531  of  whom,  by  the  way,  came  from  Germany. 
Another  part  of  our  almshouse  population — 
6,281 — were  negroes.  "Taking  the  country  as 
a  whole,"  says  the  1910  census  report  on  the 
United  States,  "the  foreign-born  whites  in  pro- 


PAUPERISM  115 

portion  to  their  numbers  contribute  to  alms- 
houses  about  four  times  as  many  paupers  as  the 
native  white."  It  is  this  immigration  that  has 
swelled  the  ranks  of  pauperism  in  our  large 
eastern  port  cities  and  States. 

Germany  has  had  no  such  problem  thrust 
upon  it.  Almost  wholly  Germany's  paupers 
have  been  native  Germans  or  other  subjects  of 
the  Kaiser — home-grown  products  of  German 
"Kultur." 


CHAPTER 


COUNTERFEIT   "SOCIAL  INSURANCE 

LARGE,  however,  as  has  been  the  officially 
registered  multitude  of  paupers  in  Germany, 
the  actual  total  would  have  been  immensely 
greater  if  much  of  the  pauperism  had  not  been 
masked. 

The  German  compulsory  workingmen's  in- 
surance laws  have  simply  covered  over  another 
large  proportion  and  have  given  it  an  alias. 
The  fundamental  remained  the  same,  but  the 
garb  was  altered.  Still  another  considerable 
part  of  pauperism  in  Germany  has  been  kept 
from  prominent  view  by  the  glamour  of  these 
social  insurance  laws.  Large  numbers  of  people 
have  drawn  poor  relief  alms  at  the  same  time 
that  they  have  received  insurance  pensions. 
But  of  the  first  fact  little  was  said,  while  the 
insurance  "benefits"  were  given  the  fullest  em- 
phasis and  the  blare  of  world-wide  notice. 

Social  insurance  is  a  valuable  and  growing 
feature  in  society.  But  when  its  operations 

116 


COUNTERFEIT  "INSURANCE"    117 

are  founded,  as  they  are  in  Germany,  upon 
fallacies  and  deceptions  from  beginning  to  end, 
its  workings  are  well  worth  scrutinizing. 

Germany's  scheme  of  compulsory  working- 
men's  insurance  was  originated  as  a  device. 
The  aim  was  to  represent  the  Hohenzollern 
dynasty  as  the  benevolent  conserver  of  "their 
people's"  welfare  and  thus  chloroform  any 
popular  sentiment  that  might  arise  to  threaten 
its  autocratic  powers.  It  was  only  a  new  ap- 
plication of  the  old  despotic  principle  of  ap- 
peasing the  populace  by  throwing  out  what 
seemed  to  be  attractive  sops.  But  the  Hohen- 
zollern method  showed  variations  from  the  an- 
cient. Just  as  the  Hohenzollerns  have  insisted 
that  their  power  was  derived  from  "divine 
right,"  so  they  have  loftily  plumed  themselves 
as  being  the  sole  source  of  "benefactions"  flow- 
ing to  "their  people."  To  them  the  German 
people  have  been  expected  to  look  for  every- 
thing, and  in  turn  the  German  people  are  com- 
manded to  be  duly  thankful  for  what  they  get, 
even  if  it  be  crumbs  in  peace  times  and  pesti- 
lence and  slaughter  in  war  times. 

The  whole  scheme  of  workingmen's  insur- 
ance in  Germany  as  it  came  from  the  autocracy 
is  based  upon  a  series  of  dogmatic  assump- 
tions. 


118  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

The  leading  assumption  is  that  sickness  is 
one  of  the  prime  causes  of  poverty. 

Students  of  social  conditions  might  well  in- 
quire if,  in  a  large  sense,  the  reverse  were  not 
true.  Indeed,  German  municipal  and  other  re- 
ports themselves  show  by  the  facts  the  sweep 
of  sickness  and  mortality  caused  by  the  long 
work  hours,  the  strain  of  intense  drudgery  upon 
men,  women,  and  children,  the  terrible  housing 
conditions,  and  the  widely  prevalent  underfeed- 
ing. But  it  has  suited  the  interest  of  the  feudal- 
militarist-industrial  regime  to  ignore  these 
facts.  When  it,  therefore,  pronounced  the 
sweeping  mandate  that  sickness  caused  poverty, 
it  became  so  in  law  and  in  obedient  popular 
belief.  The  aim  was  to  divert  attention  from 
low  wages  and  other  factors  so  powerfully  con- 
tributing to  poverty. 

A  second  assumption  is  that  the  death  of  the 
head  of  the  family  is  one  of  the  most  frequent 
causes  of  poverty.  (This,  it  may  be  remarked 
at  the  outset,  is  a  finely  ironical  assumption  on 
the  part  of  an  autocratic  government,  the  mili- 
tarist system  of  which  has  long  been  devised 
for  the  express  purpose  of  slaying  in  battle 
hundreds  of  thousands,  yes  millions,  of  heads  of 
families.) 


COUNTERFEIT  "  INSURANCE  "    119 

Apart  from  this  present  historic  fact,  if  this 
assumption  is  so  largely  true  how  is  it  that 
among  the  recipients  of  poor  relief  in  Germany 
there  have  been  so  many  heads  of  families? 
Without  doubt,  the  loss  of  the  chief  earner  does 
in  many  cases  reduce  the  family  to  destitution, 
particularly  if  there  be  very  young  children. 
But  in  the  United  States  vast  numbers  of  peo- 
ple are  protected  by  voluntary  insurance. 
Without  compulsion  or  coercion  the  United 
States  has  developed  more  life  insurance  pro- 
tection per  capita  than  Germany  or  any  other 
country  in  the  world. 

A  third  assumption  underlying  Germany's 
compulsory  insurance  laws  is  that  pauperism 
is  inevitable  as  a  result  of  industrial  accidents. 

So  it  often  is,  but  much  more  often  these 
accidents  cause  temporary  disabilities  which  do 
not  entirely  unfit  the  wage  earner  from  later 
employment  of  some  kind  or  other.  The  princi- 
ple of  compensation  is  generally  provided  for 
in  law  in  the  United  States,  and  it  is  a  good 
principle.  But  it  is  a  principle  founded  upon 
justice  in  providing  compensation  for  the  in- 
jury suffered,  not  upon  the  assumption,  as  in 
Germany,  that  the  sufferer  is  practically  a 
pauper.  The  wage  earner  in  the  United  States 
gets  compensation  as  a  matter  of  fairness  and 


120  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

just  dealing ;  its  acceptance  in  no  way  detracts 
from  his  self-respect  or  standing.  But  in  Ger- 
many the  driblets  that  the  injured  worker  gets 
are  only  another  form  of  poor  relief. 

A  fourth  sweeping  assumption  is  that  old  age 
is  one  of  the  prolific  causes  of  pauperism. 

Is  it !  No  doubt  it  may  be  in  a  country  such 
as  Germany,  where  adult  workers  have  had  to 
labor  for  starvation  or  semi-starvation  wages, 
and  where  the  savings  of  the  average  worker, 
as  shown  by  the  study  of  wage-earning  families 
by  the  Imperial  Statistical  Office  of  Germany, 
amounted  to  $4.73  a  year  for  the  skilled  worker 
and  $2.80  a  year  for  the  unskilled  laborer.  In 
Germany,  where  men,  women,  and  children  have 
had  to  work  to  make  the  family's  barest  ends 
meet,  no  adequate  provision  could,  to  be  sure, 
be  made  for  any  contingency  whatever.  Here 
in  the  United  States  old  age  has  by  no  means 
been  the  chief  factor  in  pauperism.  The  United 
States  Bureau  of  the  Census  1910  report  on 
"Paupers  in  Almshouses"  states  (p.  17)  that 
"one-third  of  the  paupers  admitted  are  under 
40  years  of  age,  one-third  are  betvreen  40  and 
59,  and  one-third  are  60  and  over." 

In  the  very  act  of  attempting  to  show  the 
beneficial  efforts  of  Germany's  social  insurance 
laws  Dr.  Zahn,  director  of  the  Royal  Bavarian 


COUNTERFEIT  "INSURANCE"    121 

Statistical  Office,  repeatedly  admits  that  they 
are  merely  another  kind  of  poor  relief. 

In  one  part  of  his  paper  he  discloses  the  fact 
that  investigations  made  by  two  private  poor- 
relief  associations  in  Germany  indicated  "that 
the  actual  increase  in  the  number  of  persons 
receiving  poor  relief  and  the  increase  in  ex- 
penditure would  both  have  been  far  greater  if 
there  had  been  no  laws  on  workingmen's  insur- 
ance, for  the  most  of  the  persons  so  assisted 
would  otherwise  have  been  a  charge  upon  the 
poor  funds."  The  amounts  in  pensions  thus 
given  have  been  so  infinitesimal  that  if  these 
very  alleged  beneficiaries  had  received  outright 
poor  relief  they  would  have  received  more,  and 
the  corresponding  costs  would,  of  course,  have 
been  greater. 

According  to  the  Statistisches  Jahrbuch  fur 
das  Deutsche  Reich  (vol.  37,  Berlin,  1916),  com- 
pulsory insurance  in  1913  comprehended: 

PERSONS 

Accident  insurance 25,800,000 

Sickness  insurance 14,555,669 

Invalidity  and  old-age  insurance 16,323,800 

From  1885  to  1913  the  total  pension  disburse- 
ments for  accident  insurance  were  $591,736,068. 


122  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

From  1891  to  1913  the  total  spent  for  invalidity 
and  old-age  pensions  was  $641,606,802. 

"Very  respectable  sums,"  say  the  eulogists. 
They  look  so  when  the  lump  sums  are  mentioned 
and  when  is  omitted  the  fact  that  much  of 
this  was  virtually  poor  relief.  But  what  have 
been  the  amounts  of  the  individual  pensions? 
According  to  the  Amtliche  Nachrichten  des 
Reichs-Versicherung-Amt,  Berlin,  these  were 
the  average  pensions  paid  out  in  the  years  1909- 
1914. 

Average  amount  of  pensions,  1909-1914. 


Year. 

IQOQ 

Inva- 
lidity. 

$41.60 

Sick- 
ness. 

$41.4"; 

Old 
age. 

$78.01 

Wid- 
ows 
and 
wid- 
owers. 

Wid- 
ows' 
sick- 
ness. 

Or- 
phans 

IQIO 

42  II 

41  Si 

^0  II 

IOII 

4286 

42.24 

^0."U 

1912 

1913 
1914 

44-50 
46.51 

4779 

4576 
48.45 
49.38 

39-54 
3975 
39.98 

$18.34 
18.49 
18.77 

$18.46 
18.59 
18.95 

$19.25 
19.07 
18.59 

Thus  we  see  that  the  largest  pension  given 
did  not  amount  to  $1  a  week.  The  disabled 
had  to  get  along  in  1914  on  a  pension  of  about 
91  cents  a  week,  and  less  in  previous  years. 
The  sick  invalid,  in  1914,  had  to  subsist  on  a 
pension  of  95  cents  a  week,  and  old  age  on  a 
pension  of  less  than  77  cents  a  week.  Widows 
and  widowers,  sick  widows  and  orphans  each 


COUNTERFEIT  "INSURANCE"  123 

received  the  munificent  pension  of  between  36 
and  38  or  39  cents  a  week.  How  they  performed 
the  miracle  of  existing  on  these  sums  no  German 
official  report  explains. 

But  what  the  reports  of  the  Berlin  Invalidity 
Insurance  Institution  do  show  is  that  in  a  great 
number  of  cases  these  so-called  "pension  bene- 
fits" have  not  prevented  the  recipients  from 
becoming  a  charge  upon  the  poor  law.  Thus  in 
Berlin  of  15,799  males  receiving  invalidity  pen- 
sions, 2,530,  or  16  per  cent  of  the  total  number, 
also  received  poor  relief,  and  of  13,032  females 
who  received  invalidity  pensions,  2,643,  or  20 
per  cent,  also  received  poor  relief.  It  is  a  fact 
of  the  greatest  significance  that  of  the  persons 
becoming  entitled  to  invalidity  pensions  nearly 
one-half  were  already  in  receipt  of  poor-law 
money  grants,  and  most  of  them  retained  those 
poor-law  allowances,  generally  at  a  higher 
figure.  The  same  was  true  of  those  receiving 
old-age  pensions.  "Abandonment  of  the  poor- 
law  money-grants,"  Dr.  Zahn  comments,  "oc- 
curred only  in  isolate^  cases." 

Here  we  have  the  true  inklings  of  the  opera- 
tions of  Germany's  "wonderful"  working- 
men's  insurance  laws.  Most  palpably  they  are 
the  rankest  counterfeit.  Yet  ignoring  both  their 
essentials  and  their  effects  a  prominent  writer 


124  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

of  a  widely  circulated  book  booming  Germany's 
"  socialization "  has  the  impudence  to  assert 
that  these  laws  prove  Germany  to  be  "a  demo- 
cratically minded  country. "  The  doling  out  of 
miserable  pittances  passing  under  the  high- 
flown  term  of  pensions,  of  36  to  95  cents  a  week, 
is  transformed  by  that  prismatic  writer  into  "a 
juster  distribution  of  wealth"  and  "a  more  gen- 
erous distribution  of  the  gains  of  civilization. ' ' 

Extraordinary,  indeed,  have  been  this  "gen- 
erosity" and  these  "gains"  in  Germany  where 
a  large  proportion  of  those  receiving  these  in- 
surance pensions  have  already  been  on  the  reg- 
ular official  pauper  list  and  have  remained  there. 
If  the  number  thus  getting  double  government 
alms  in  Berlin — about  one-fifth  to  one- sixth — 
has  applied  to  the  whole  German  Empire,  then 
self -evidently  there  has  been  an  enormous  num- 
ber of  "pensioners"  who  at  the  same  time  have 
had  to  draw  poor  relief  alms.  Even  when  both 
pensions  and  poor  relief  alms  were  combined 
the  total  sum  has  been  so  puny  that  it  would 
require  the  most  violent  stretch  of  the  imagina- 
tion to  dignify  it  as  even  beginning  to  pay  for 
the  crudest  elementals  of  life. 

What  a  cheap  bribe!  For  thirty  years  the 
German  people  were  taught  to  look  upon  their 
Government  as  "the  most  benevolent  on  earth," 


COUNTERFEIT  "INSURANCE"    125 

and  a  few  paltry  coins  thrown  to  them  con- 
vinced them  that  that  was  actually  the  fact. 
They  were  assured  (as  we  in  America  have  been 
assured)  that  compulsory  insurance  prolonged 
life  to  an  unusual  degree  when,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  as  Dr.  Frederick  L.  Hoffman  has  demon- 
strated, the  actual  gain  in  longevity  in  Ger- 
many during  a  30-year  period  was  only  1.6 
years.  From  1888-1892  compared  with  the  4- 
year  period  1908-1912  Berlin's  death  rate  de- 
creased only  27.8  per  cent  while  during  the  same 
period  New  York  City's  death  rate  decreased 
39.9  per  cent.  New  York  City  in  1917  had  the 
lowest  death  rate  in  its  history,  and  a  lower 
death  rate  than  was  ever  experienced  by  the 
city  of  Berlin  up  to  the  outbreak  of  the  war. 

Another  potent  fact  passed  over  by  eulogists 
of  German  conditions  has  been  the  abnormal 
number  of  suicides,  both  child  and  adult,  in 
Germany.  If  Germany's  "social  measures" 
have  been  so  conducive  to  health,  security,  and 
happiness,  as  has  been  claimed,  why  should  so 
shocking  a  proportion  of  Germans,  especially 
children  and  youths,  have  violently  projected 
themselves  out  of  what  Americans  have  been 
told  was  a  paradise?  This  strikingly  large 
number  of  suicides  in  Germany  was  not  occa- 
sional :  it  was  continuous,  and  went  on  in  peace 


126  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

times.  Instead  of  delights  this  mass  of  self- 
destroyers  evidently  found  nothing  but  de- 
spair. 

Statistics  applying  to  a  definite  period  of 
years  show  that  there  have  been  8  times  as 
many  child  suicides  in  Saxony  as  in  the  United 
States,  and  15  times  more  child  suicides  in 
Berlin  than  in  New  York  City. 

The  suicide  rate  for  children  from  10  to  14 
years  of  age  has  been — 

Per 
100,000 
popula- 
tion. 

United  States  Registration  Area 0.55 

Alsace-Lorraine 0.85 

Bavaria 1.55 

Saxony 4.39 

Saxony  is  an  intensely  industrial  State,  the 
working  population  of  which  was  badly  over- 
worked, underfed,  and  vilely  housed.  Saxony 
has  also  long  been  under  strong  Prussian  in- 
fluence. Bavaria  has  been  less  so,  and  Alsace- 
Lorraine  has  been  the  least  affected  by  German 
and  Prussian  influence  combined. 

During  the  same  period  of  years  the  child 
suicide  rates  of  New  York  City  and  Berlin 


COUNTERFEIT  "  INSURANCE  "    127 

were :  New  York  City,  0.19  per  100,000  popula- 
tion; Berlin,  2.99  per  100,000  population. 

There  were,  therefore,  in  proportion  to  popu- 
lation, 15  child  suicides  in  Berlin  to  every  1 
child  suicide  in  New  York  City.  In  other  words, 
child  suicides  were  15  times  more  frequent  in 
Berlin  than  in  New  York  City. 

And  what  of  youths  or  girls  of  15  to  19  years 
of  age  I  The  suicide  rates  for  them  have  been — 

Per 

100,000 
popula- 
tion. 

United  States  Registration  Area 6.82 

Alsace-Lorraine 7.65 

Bavaria 11.93 

Saxony 26.98 

Hence,  there  were  approximately  4  suicides 
of  adolescents  in  Saxony  for  every  1  in  the 
United  States.  Or,  to  put  the  fact  in  another 
way,  suicides  in  early  life  were  4  times  more 
frequent  in  Saxony  than  in  the  United  States. 

Comparing  the  cities  of  New  York  City  and 
Berlin  the  suicide  rates  of  youths  or  girls  15  to 
19  years  of  age  during  the  same  period  were: 
New  York  City,  6.07  per  100,000  population; 


128  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

Berlin,  29.09  per  100,000  population.  To  put  the 
concrete  fact  approximately,  there  were  during 
the  same  period  5  suicides  of  youthful  persons 
in  Berlin  to  every  1  in  New  York  City. 

As  for  the  general  suicide  rate,  including  all 
ages,  it  has  been  abnormally  high  in  many  parts 
of  Germany. 

During  the  five  years  ending  with  1913  the 
suicide  rate  per  100,000  of  population  was  32.6 
in  the  Kingdom  of  Saxony ;  33.1  in  the  Province 
of  Brandenburg,  exclusive  of  the  city  of  Berlin ; 
16.2  in  the  Kingdom  of  Bavaria;  and  15.5  in 
Alsace-Lorraine.  During  the  same  period  of 
years  the  suicide  rate  of  the  United  States  Reg- 
istration Area  was  16.1  per  100,000  of  popula- 
tion. 

The  suicide  rate  of  the  city  of  Berlin  during 
the  five  years  ending  with  1913  was  (per  100,000 
population)  35.8  against  17.2  for  the  city  of 
New  York  and  11.0  for  London.  The  differ- 
ence in  favor  of  the  United  States  is,  therefore, 
very  decided.  There  are,  of  course,  more  or 
less  pronounced  variations  in  the  suicide  rate 
throughout  Germany.  A  low  rate  prevails 
generally  in  the  Catholic  section  of  Westphalia, 
the  Rhine  provinces,  and  the  Polish  provinces 
of  Prussia.  A  wide  belt  of  intense  suicide  fre- 
quency or  a  rate  of  from  30  to  35  per  100,000 


COUNTERFEIT  "INSURANCE"    129 

stretches  from  the  North  Sea  along  the  Elbe  to 
Bohemia. 

The  high  rates  show  unquestionably  the  de- 
cided unfavorable  moral  and  spiritual  condition 
of  the  German  people  attributable  in  part  no 
doubt  to  discontent  arising  from  prevalent  in- 
dustrial and  political  conditions. 

Still  another  highly  significant  fact  ignored 
by  the  eulogists  of  Germany  is  that  disclosing 
the  astounding  extent  of  crime  in  the  German 
Empire.  In  his  illuminating  volume  entitled 
4 'The  Soul  of  Germany,"  Dr.  Thomas  F.  A. 
Smith  gives  (p.  350)  these  figures  of  the  aver- 
age yearly  number  of  convictions  for  serious 
and  brutal  crimes  in  Germany  and  England,  re- 
spectively, taking  care  to  point  out  that  the 
population  of  the  British  Isles  was  45,000,000, 
and  that  of  Germany  66,000,000.  The  following 
figures  cover  the  period  of  twelve  years  from 
1901  to  1912  inclusive: 

Germany    British  Isles 

Malicious  and  felonious  wounding. . .  125,386  1,213 

M'irders,  including  every  class 1,106  296 

Rapes,    defilement    of    imbeciles    and 

girls  under  14  5,310  789 

Incest 489  53 

Unnatural  crimes  648  122 

Illegitimate  children   178,1 15  48,702 

Divorce  petitions   20,340  965 

Malicious  damage  to  property 19,689  358 

Arson    610  278 

Perjury   554  98 

White  slavery  and  procuration 3,900  27 


ISO  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

The  foregoing  figures,  says  Dr.  Smith,  "for 
both  the  British  Isles  and  Germany  are  the 
numbers  of  individuals  actually  convicted.  Fur- 
thermore, the  German  figures  do  not  include  the 
crimes  committed  by  soldiers  and  sailors  in  the 
German  army  and  navy  respectively.  The  Brit- 
ish statistics  include  all  persons  convicted  in 
these  islands,  whether  civilians  or  other- 
wise  " 

These  figures,  showing  such  flagrant  immor- 
ality and  criminality  in  Germany,  so  amazed 
Principal  George  L.  Fox,  of  the  University 
School,  New  Haven,  Conn.,  that  he  could  not 
believe  their  accuracy.  He  accordingly  exam- 
ined the  official  statistical  publications  issued 
by  the  German  Government  to  see  whether  Dr. 
Smith  had  stated  the  figures  correctly.  A 
thorough  study  of  these  and  other  German  docu- 
ments showed  that  the  situation  had  not  been 
exaggerated.  The  figures  for  Germany  given  in 
"Statistik  des  Deutschen  Reichs  (Imperial 
Statistics  of  the  German  Empire),  vol.  228,  en- 
titled "Kriminalstatistik,"  show  the  continuous 
great  proportion  of  crime. 

One  of  the  worst  features  of  this  sweep  of 
criminality  was  the  amount  of  youthful  deprav- 
ity. Of  13,562  persons  convicted  in  1908  of 


COUNTERFEIT  "  INSURANCE  "    131 

crimes  against  morality,  1,319  were  between  the 
ages  of  12  and  18,  and  of  1,957  persons  con- 
victed in  the  same  year  of  crimes  causing  death, 
176  were  of  the  same  ages.  There  was  also  a 
large  proportion  of  juveniles  convicted  of  arson. 
(Large  as  the  extent  of  juvenile  crime  was  be- 
fore the  war,  the  figures  of  juvenile  criminality, 
so  Minister  of  Justice  Spahn  of  Prussia  recently 
declared,  were  "extraordinarily  serious.") 
The  annual  number  of  illegitimate  children  born 
in  Germany  was  enormous.  In  1910  there  were 
179,584.  From  1901  to  1910  about  178,000  ille- 
gitimate children  were  yearly  born  in  Germany. 
Extraordinary  as  the  fact  may  seem  to  those 
who  read  only  fairy  tales  of  Germany  it  is  a 
fact,  as  the  German  official  statistics  show,  that 
25  per  cent  of  the  children  born  in  Berlin  annu- 
ally have  been  illegitimate.  No  doubt,  this  may 
be  attributable  in  part  to  the  frightful  tenement 
overcrowding  in  one  or  two  rooms,  but  it  also 
sprung  from  the  scorn  of  morality  set  in  fashion 
by  the  militarists  and  their  philosophers  and 
teachers  in  order  to  prepare  the  German  people 
more  effectively  to  rob  and  despoil  their  neigh- 
bors. The  crimes  that  were  so  prevalent  in 
Germany  before  the  war  were  only  the  precur- 
sors of  the  greater  crimes  committed  during 


132  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

the  war  in  the  sacking  of  Belgium,  France, 
Serbia,  and  other  countries,  such  enormities  as 
the  torpedoing  of  the  Lusitania,  and  the  mass  of 
other  atrocities  committed  by  the  German  army 
and  navy. 

But  when  we  turn  from  statistics  to  recent 
consequential  realities  what  is  it  that  we  fur- 
ther see!  That  the  very  autocracy  which  by 
its  methods  practically  bribed  the  German 
people  into  acquiescence  is  the  identical  dynastic 
clique  that  plunged  the  world  into  war  and 
which  knew  in  advance  that  its  carefully-con- 
cocted war  would  cause  the  butchery  of  vast 
numbers  of  its  "dear  people."  While  the  Ger- 
man people  were  influenced  to  regard  their 
Government  as  benevolent  toward  them,  the 
Government  contemptuously  had  the  working 
people  enrolled  as  virtually  a  nation  of  paupers 
dependent  upon  its  bounty.  All  of  the  fine-spun 
"  benevolent "  schemes  of  the  German  Govern- 
ment were  but  so  many  adroit  agencies  to  en- 
chain the  people  to  its  divine-right  militarist 
system. 

This  is  the  great  salient  fact,  the  fact  of  facts. 
The  compulsions  of  the  German  social,  educa- 
tional, and  militarist  system  went  far  in  crush- 
ing independence  of  thought  and  action.  The 
compulsory  insurance  schemes  completed  the 


COUNTERFEIT  "INSURANCE"    133 

process.  They  fixed  as  a  finality  the  habit  on 
the  part  of  the  mass  of  people  of  humbly  look- 
ing up  to  the  Government  for  everything.  The 
autocracy  deified  itself  as  the  enthroned  arbiter 
of  popular  well-being.  As  its  deceptions  in  or- 
dinary times  were  blindly  accepted  so  were  its 
deceptions  as  blindly  believed  when  the  German 
people  were  ordered  to  the  sacrifice  for  its  ag- 
grandizement. 

Commanded  to  immolate  themselves  for  a 
Government  in  which  they  have  no  real  voice, 
what  is  the  fate  of  the  German  people?  What 
does  the  German  Government  do  for  the  fam- 
ilies of  its  fighting  men  for  the  legions  of 
maimed  and  mangled,  for  the  widows  and  or- 
phans 1  It  flings  them  sums  in  military  pensions 
and  military  separation  allowances  so  small 
that  they  can  not  suffice  for  normal  wants.  In 
fact,  great  numbers  of  families  of  German 
trades-union  members  have  been  compelled  to 
draw  upon  the  trades-unions  for  war  service 
subsidies,  which  drain  has  greatly  depleted 
trade-union  treasuries. 

In  Germany  the  wife  of  an  enlisted  soldier 
gets  a  separation  allowance  of  $4.76  a  month* 
If  she  has  children  the  monthly  amount  varies 
from  $7.14  for  one  child  to  $14.28  if  she  has 
four  children.  For  each  additional  child  $2.38  a 


134  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

month  is  allowed.  In  the  United  States  military 
separation  allowances  are  paid  to  the  wife  as  a 
matter  of  right  irrespective  of  her  circum- 
stances. But  in  Germany  the  wife  can  not  get 
these  allowances  unless  she  pleads  and  proves 
pauperism.  And  after  she  is  awarded  them  she 
and  her  children  have  to  face  semi-starvation  in 
a  country  where,  according  to  the  Leipziger 
Volksseitung  of  September  3, 1917,  the  price  of 
potatoes  had  increased  233  per  cent,  the  price 
of  lard  371  per  cent,  and  the  prices  of  other 
staples  had  enormously  increased  since  the 
war's  outbreak.  Great  Britain  pays  more  than 
twice  what  Germany  does  to  enlisted  soldiers' 
families.  France  pays  $24.60  a  month  to  a 
wife  and  four  children. 

To  disabled  soldiers  the  German  Govern- 
ment pays  only  $10.72  a  month,  and  in  case  of 
mutilation,  extra  bonuses  varying  from  $3.57 
to  $12.86  a  month.  Hard-pressed  France  pays 
$19.30  per  month.  Great  Britain  pays  from 
$28.99  to  $50.07  a  month  to  disabled  enlisted 
men. 

The  German  soldier's  widow  having  no  chil- 
dren gets  a  pension  of  only  $7.94  a  month,  and 
from  $11.27  to  $21.26  a  month  according  to  the 
number  of  children  up  to  four.  To  each  addi- 
tional child  $3.33  a  month  is  allowed.  France 


pays  less,  but  Great  Britain  much  more.  In 
Great  Britain  widows'  pensions  range  from 
$14.49  to  $30.31  a  month  and  more. 

If  the  German  Government  is,  as  its  eulogists 
say,  so  "generous,"  what  superlative  is  to  be 
applied  to  the  United  States  Government  in  its 
provisions  for  the  families  of  its  fighters? 

From  the  United  States  Government  the 
family  of  an  enlisted  man  gets  one-half  of  his 
pay  with  a  supplementary  allowance  up  to  $50 
a  month.  The  United  States  Government  pays 
$15  a  month  to  a  wife.  If  the  wife  has  one 
child  she  gets  $25  a  month ;  and  for  each  addi- 
tional child  $5  more  a  month.  To  an  orphan 
child  $5  a  month  is  paid;  to  two  orphan  chil- 
dren $12.50  a  month ;  to  three  $20 ;  to  four  $30 ; 
and  to  each  additional  orphan  $5  a  month.  One 
or  two  parents  of  an  American  soldier  each 
get  $10  a  month ;  and  where  there  is  dependency 
step-parents,  grandparents,  grandchildren, 
brothers  and  sisters  each  receive  $5  a  month. 
These  payments  are  in  addition  to  the  family 
allotment  of  one-half  the  soldier's  pay. 

In  case  of  death  all  dependents  are  more 
fully  provided  for  by  the  United  States  Govern- 
ment. This  applies  to  Army,  Navy,  and  Nurse 
Corps.  A  widow  gets  $25  a  month.  If  the 
widow  has  one  child  she  receives  $35  a  month ; 


136  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

if  two  children,  $47.50  a  month ;  and  $5  a  month 
for  each  additional  child.  A  child  left  an  or- 
phan receives  $20  a  month;  two  orphans  in  a 
family,  $30  a  month;  three  orphans,  $40  a 
month,  and  $5  for  each  additional  child.  To  a 
widowed  mother  $20  a  month  is  paid.  Pay- 
ments to  a  widow  or  widowed  mother  continue 
until  death  or  remarriage.  All  of  these  benefits 
are  fixed  sums  and  are  uniform  for  all  classes  of 
persons  without  regard  to  rank. 

For  total  disability  suffered  by  any  Ameri- 
can soldier,  sailor,  or  Army  or  Navy  nurse  there 
is  another  scale  of  compensation.  A  single  man 
gets  $30  a  month.  If  he  has  a  wife  he  gets  $45 
a  month.  If  he  has  a  wife  and  one  child  he  re- 
ceives $55  a  month ;  if  a  wife  and  two  children, 
$65  a  month ;  and  $75  a  month  if  he  has  a  wife 
and  three  or  more  children.  If  the  wife  is  not 
living,  but  there  is  one  child,  the  United  States 
Government  pays  $40  a  month,  with  $10  a  month 
For  each  additional  child  up  to  two  children. 
An  additional  $10  is  paid  in  case  there  is  a 
dependent  widowed  mother.  If  a  constant 
attendant  is  needed  the  Government  allows  an 
amount  not  to  exceed  $20  a  month.  For  the 
loss  of  both  feet  or  both  hands  or  for  total 
blindness  causing  helplessness,  $100  a  month, 
with  other  allowance,  is  paid. 


Partial  disability  is  compensated  on  the  basis 
of  reduction  of  earning  capacity.  No  payments 
are  however,  made  where  the  reduction  is  less 
than  10  per  cent.  Medical,  surgical,  and  hos- 
pital services,  with  all  necessary  supplies  such 
as  artificial  limbs,  are  furnished  by  the  United 
States  Government.  And  where  death  ensues 
before  the  discharge  or  resignation  from  the 
service  $100  is  given  for  the  cost  of  bringing 
the  body  home  and  burial  expenses. 

The  fourth  article  in  the  law  allows  every 
person  in  the  service  to  take  out  insurance. 
All  expense  of  administration  and  the  excess 
mortality  and  disability  cost  caused  by  the  haz- 
ards of  war  are  borne  by  the  United  States 
Government.  By  January  31,  1918,  a  total  of 
631,476  applications  for  insurance  policies  had 
been  made  by  soldiers,  sailors,  marines,  and 
nurses  in  the  service  of  the  United  States.  The 
Insurance  applied  for  at  the  War  Risk  Insurance 
Bureau  totaled  $5,290,746,000.  It  is  now  billions 
of  dollars  more.  The  average  amount  of  insur- 
ance asked  for  was  $8,378. 

The  wide  difference  between  the  character  of 
the  two  Governments  is  manifest.  The  German 
autocracy  makes  the  pretenses;  the  American 
democracy  gives  performance.  In  the  one  the 
people  exist  for  the  Government  and  must  per- 


138  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

force  take  what  it  gives  them.  In  the  other,  the 
Government  exists  for  the  people,  and  its  laws 
measure  to  genuine  ideals  and  make  real  provi- 
sion for  the  popular  welfare. 

Many  shams  are  being  swept  away  by  the 
great  war.  One  of  these  is  the  long-maintained 
pretense  of  Germany's  unexcelled  social  prog- 
ress. It  was  a  sham  elevated  to  be  a  fetich. 
Examined,  it  turns  out  to  be  a  poor  shoddy  thing 
which  can  no  longer  be  imposed  upon  the  world. 


CHAPTER  IX 

TEACHING   MENTAL   AND   SOCIAL   SERVITUDE 

THE  exhorters  of  German  "Kultur"  repre- 
sented the  Prussian  school  system  as  the 
world's  model.  The  same  crowd  so  extrava- 
gantly praising  Germany's  "social  uplift " 
claims  was  equally  vociferous  over  what  they 
called  Germany's  superior  educational  system. 

These  extreme  admirers  of  Germany's  ways 
and  measures  liked  to  draw  a  contrast  to  Amer- 
ica's disadvantage.  They  saw  little  that  was 
commendable  in  our  educational  methods. 
Crude,  superficial,  insubstantial — these  were  a 
few  of  the  characterizations  they  applied  to 
our  schools  and  colleges.  They  declared  that 
on  the  whole  our  educational  institutions  were 
without  solidity  or  character,  and  could  pro- 
duce nothing  but  mass  mediocrity. 

The  Prussian  school  was  their  ideal.  There, 
they  told  us,  could  be  found  purpose  and  sys- 
tem. There  could  be  seen  appreciation  of  real 
scholarship  diffused  among  the  people  from  the 

139 


140  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

child  to  the  adult.  There  could  be  found  the 
kind  of  training  that  beginning  with  the  juvenile 
was  so  highly  developed  as  to  breed  a  nation  of 
thinking,  intelligent,  cultivated  people,  the 
very  flower  of  the  human  race. 

Large  were  these  flattering  generalizations. 
Their  very  fulsomeness  might  well  have  aroused 
doubt  if  not  suspicion. 

Specifications,  too,  were  conspicuously  absent. 
"We  were  not  told  just  what  was  the  purpose 
at  the  foundation  of  the  Prussian  school  sys- 
tem. It  was  never  explained  why  an  autocratic 
government,  based  upon  a  feudal-industrial  oli- 
garchy, should  so  energetically  approve  of  that 
school  system.  That  an  arbitrary  government 
steadily  denying  real  political  power  to  the  Ger- 
man people  should  insist  upon  retaining  that 
system  was  a  most  suspicious  circumstance. 
Alone,  that  ominous  fact  should  have  stimulated 
inquiry  into  the  purpose  behind  it  all.  But  it 
did  not,  at  least  among  the  considerable  groups 
whose  writings  were  devoted  to  the  one  end  of 
glorifying  Germany.  Neither  did  they  tell  us 
what  the  Prussian  school  system  was  actually 
accomplishing  in  results.  Culture,  said  they, 
and  the  most  of  the  world  believed  their  asser- 
tions. That  was  before  the  world  had  the  hor- 
rifying opportunity  of  seeing  just  what  this 


MENTAL  AND  SOCIAL  SERVITUDE    141 

"Kultur"  consisted  of — the  ingrained  brutality 
of  a  whole  people  and  the  prevalence  among  it 
of  a  code  of  immorality  and  immorality  the 
frightful  workings  of  which  have  put  a  world  in 
arms  determined  to  stop  them. 

To  many  people,  perhaps,  the  particular  qual- 
ities revealed  by  the  German  people  are  inex- 
plicable phenomena.  A  people  that  we  were  long 
assured  were  inoffensive  show  themselves  bar- 
barians outclassing  even  ancient  barbarians.  A 
people  that  we  were  told  were  intelligent  and 
thinking  disclose  themselves  as  automata, 
blindly  obeying  the  decrees  of  authority,  hating 
as  a  unit  when  ordered  to  do  so,  believing  as  a 
unit,  or  almost  so,  whatever  authority  tells 
them  to  believe,  committing  the  grossest,  most 
appalling  violations  of  the  rights  of  other  peo- 
ples when  imperial  authority  issues  its  man- 
dates. Why  is  this  so?  And  why  is  it  that  a 
people  held  in  abject  subjection  by  its  rulers, 
imposed  upon  by  spurious  "social  reforms"  as 
well  as  in  other  ways,  should  die  by  the  millions 
to  intrench  and  extend  the  power  of  the  very 
autocracy  which  oppresses  it  most? 

This  would  be  a  riddle  were  it  not  for  one 
fact.  That  fact  is  the  Prussian  school  system. 
It  was  adroitly  originated  as  the  most  power- 
ful means  of  assuring  a  submissive,  pliable 


142  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

populace.  That  function  it  has  continued  to 
fill  successfully  to  this  very  day.  When  during 
the  course  of  the  war  the  German  Government, 
for  ulterior  purposes  of  its  own,  caused  news 
dispatches  to  be  sent  out  intimating  that  a  revo- 
lution might  break  out  in  Germany,  many  people 
in  other  countries  accepted  those  reports.  This 
was  what  the  German  Government  wanted.  It 
sought  to  discourage  protective  war  prepara- 
tions in  other  countries  by  convincing  them  that 
there  would  soon  be  a  change  in  Germany.  But 
the  German  Government  well  knew  that  there 
would  be  no  revolution.  It  knew  that  no  matter 
how  much  the  German  people  suffered,  starved 
or  faced  slaughter,  it  had  them  well  in  hand. 
Only  dire  defeat  could  bring  revolt,  and  this  it 
never  foresaw.  It  trusted  in  its  school  system, 
devised  for  the  express  purpose  of  insuring 
submission. 

From  the  time  of  Frederick  the  Great  the 
Prussian  school  system  has  been  the  most  ef- 
fective auxiliary  and  mainstay  of  the  autocracy 
based  on  the  feudal  caste  and  the  industrial 
oligarchy.  Not  the  army,  as  has  been  popularly 
supposed.  Militarism  has  been  the  outward 
tool,  but  the  real  agency  has  been  the  school 
system. 

To  speak  of  one  purpose  for  which  the  Prus- 


MENTAL  AND  SOCIAL  SERVITUDE    143 

I 

sian  school  system  was  founded  is  incorrect.    It 

was  founded  for  three  clear  purposes.  These 
purposes  all  interlinked  and  formed  the  unity 
desired  by  the  rulers.  In  America  public  schools 
were  established  on  the  theory  that  a  common- 
wealth could  not  exist  without  an  intelligent, 
discerning,  self-reliant  citizenship.  But  what 
has  been  and  is  the  threefold  purpose  of  the 
Prussian  school  system?  It  is: 

1.  To  drill  the  idea  firmly  into  the  children 
of  the  common  people  that  they  must  be  con- 
tent to  remain  in  the  station  of  life  in  which 
they  were  born.    They  must  not  think  of  aspir- 
ing higher.    The  effect  of  a  century  and  a  half 
of  systematically  teaching  this  is  evident.    It 
aims  at  the  perpetuation  of  a  humble  attitude 
toward  the  royal,  feudal,  military  and  pluto- 
cratic caste.    It  seeks  to  assure  an  immunity  of 
those  castes  against  questioning,  criticism  and 
overthrow,  and  a  perpetuation  of  their  rank, 
privileges  and  power.     It  guarantees  to  the 
ruling    castes    an    abundance    of    docile,    sub- 
servient drudges,  properly  trained  to  humil- 
ity. 

2.  To  teach  the  child  incessantly  from  its 
sixth  year  of  age  absolute  obedience  to  author- 
ity.   This,  of  course,  in  Germany  signifies  the 
Hohenzollerns,  encircled  by  the  feudal  and  in- 


144  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

dustrial  lords.  The  common  people  have,  as  we 
have  pointed  out,  no  real  political  power.  Ar- 
rogating all  central  power  to  themselves,  the 
Hohenzollerns  claim  their  power  by  "Divine 
Appointment." 

3.  To  instill  the  "historical  motive."  This 
means  imbuing  the  child  from  its  early  years 
with  an  exalted  idea  of  the  glorious  deeds  of 
Germany,  which,  again,  of  course,  is  made  to  re- 
volve around  the  Hohenzollerns.  This  is  the 
teaching  that  has  always  been  depended  upon 
to  appeal  to  the  child 's  imagination  and  ego- 
tism, and  generate  a  passion  for  things  martial. 
The  foundation  for  militarism  is  thus  laid  in 
the  public  schools.  All  the  teachings  from  the 
first  grade  illustrate  or  point  to  its  necessity. 
At  the  same  time  the  teachings  of  the  glory  of 
Germany  create  a  passion  for  the  "Fatherland" 
idea — a  passion  that  in  the  man  or  woman  be- 
comes a  positive  mania. 

This  threefold  purpose  did  not  develop  acci- 
dentally or  without  forethought.  It  was  estab- 
lished calculatingly  from  the  start.  The  whole 
system  and  the  results  to  be  expected  from  it 
were  carefully  thought  out  before  being  decided 
upon.  In  his  work  on  "The  Prussian  Element- 
ary Schools,"  Professor  Thomas  Alexander 
shows  this  clearly. 


MENTAL  AND  SOCIAL  SERVITUDE    145 

Frederick  the  Great  wrote  to  Minister  von 
Zedlitzinl779: 

"...  It  is  sufficient  in  the  flat  conntry 
(northern  Germany)  if  the  people  can  read  and 
write  a  little ;  for  if  they  know  too  much,  they 
rush  off  to  the  cities  and  want  to  become  secre- 
taries or  clerks,  etc.  For  this  reason  we  must 
so  arrange  the  instruction  of  the  youth  in  the 
flat  country  that  they  learn  that  which  is  most 
necessary  for  their  knowledge  yet  they  must  be 
taught  in  such  a  way  that  they  will  not  run 
away  from  the  villages  but  remain  there  con- 
tentedly." 

And  Frederick  the  Great  saw  to  it  that  the 
kind  of  teachers  appropriate  for  his  purpose 
were  placed  in  the  schools.  They  were  nothing 
more  or  less  than  drill-sergeants — invalided 
and  crippled  soldiers,  products  of  the  militarist 
system  he  wanted  perpetuated. 

King  Frederick  "William  III  of  Prussia  fol- 
lowed the  same  lines  as  Frederick  the  Great. 
His  circular  order  of  August  31,  1799,  dealing 
with  garrison  schools  to  " educate"  soldiers 
while  serving  gives  his  ideas  of  just  what  sort 
of  "education"  he  prescribed  for  the  mass  of 
people.  That  circular  order  read: 

"True  enlightenment,  in  so  far  as  it  is  neces- 
sary for  his  and  the  general  good,  is  the  ineon- 


146  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

testable  right  of  that  person  who,  in  the  walk  of 
life  in  which  fate  has  placed  him,  knows  his 
relationships  and  duties  and  has  the  ability  to 
satisfy  them.  Therefore,  to  this  purpose,  the 
instruction  in  all  Volksschulen  should  be  limited. 
The  time  which  one  applies  therein  to  a  super- 
ficial study  of  the  sciences  for  which  the  ordi- 
nary man  has  little  use  is  for  the  most  part  lost. 
He  forgets  quickly  what  he  has  heard,  and 
there  remain  in  his  memory  only  incomplete 
conceptions  out  of  which  false  conclusions 
arise,  and  tastes  which  his  social  standing  does 
not  allow  him  to  satisfy,  and  which  only  make 
him  discontented  and  unhappy. 

"Since  the  chief  purpose  of  the  'garrison' 
schools  is  to  train  future  soldiers,  it  is  only 
necessary  to  teach  them  what  is  necessary  for 
the  common  soldier,  under  officer  and  sergeant 
to  know  in  order  to  fill  their  places  as  useful 
and  contented  men.  .  .  . 

"I  demand  for  the  intellectual  [!]  training 
of  a  soldier  that  he  know  exactly  his  duties  as 
a  man,  as  a  subject  and  as  a  soldier ;  that  he  be 
taught  enough  of  the  different  trades  which  are 
suited  to  his  position  in  life,  and  of  the  means 
of  applying  this  knowledge,  so  that  he  can  select 
those  things  for  his  future  calling  which  cor- 
respond most  closely  with  his  inclinations  and 


ability ;  and  that  he  can  read,  write  and  cipher 
well  for  the  conduct  of  his  own  affairs  as  well 
as  for  the  advancement  to  the  position  of  under 
officer  or  sergeant,  and  that  he  acquire  the  in- 
formation necessary  for  an  artisan. 

"A  soldier  fitted  out  with  these  qualities  will 
be  in  his  own  place  a  useful  servant  of  the  state, 
and  likewise  a  happy  man,  if  no  one  seeks  to 
awake  in  Mm  a  striving  toward  higher  things. 
The  seed  of  discontent  with  one's  social  station 
will  develop  in  that  degree  in  which  one  expands 
further  one's  scientific  training.  Only  a  few 
men  in  the  lower  classes  are  so  neglected  by 
Nature  that  they  do  not  have  the  ability  to  ac- 
complish more  than  their  social  position  or  call- 
ing demands,  and  to  raise  themselves  to  some 
higher  position.  A  too  expansive  course  of 
instruction  will  awaken  the  feelings  of  such 
ability  in  them,  through  the  application  of  which 
they  would  easily  ~be  able  to  gain  for  themselves 
a  much  more  favorable  fate  than  that  of  a  com- 
mon soldier.  The  result  is  that  a  superficial 
acquaintance  with  the  sciences  generally  pro- 
duces a  disinclination  toward  learning  a 
trade. 

"The  spirit  of  the  age,"  the  circular  went 
on,  doubtless  referring  to  America  and  to  the 
French  Eevolution,  "has  aroused  in  all  classes 


148  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

of  society  an  unceasing  effort  to  raise  one's  self 
above  one's  own  social  stratum,  or  at  least  to 
extend  its  pretensions  higher.  ...  I  will, 
therefore,  see  that  in  all  Volksschulen  such  in- 
struction be  introduced  that  will  instill  in  the 
younger  generation  more  love  and  respect  for 
the  trade  and  social  position  of  their  parents.  I 
hereby  make  it  the  duty  of  all  military  chiefs 
not  to  lose  sight  of  this  point  of  view. 

'  *  The  soldier  must  be  instructed  so  carefully 
concerning  the  claims  which  the  State  has  upon 
his  services,  and  also  concerning  his  duties  and 
obligations,  and  likewise  his  rights,  that  his  own 
judgment  will  lead  him  to  ~be  contented  with  his 
lot,  and  that  he  will  cease  as  far  as  possible 
to  look  with  envy  and  secret  hate  upon  his  su- 
periors. 

"Whoever  has  the  ability  to  write  a  good 
text-book  with  this  end  in  view  can  render  great 
service  to  the  future  happiness  [!]  of  the  sol- 
diers, and  can  be  assured  of  my  most  earnest 
gratitude.  I  would  desire  that  the  religious  in- 
struction be  included  in  this  text,  and  that  after 
discussion  of  the  Ten  Commandments  all  civil 
crimes  and  their  punishments  be  explained 
briefly  and  plainly  in  categorical  form.  Such  a 
book  would  in  itself  be  more  useful  reading  for 
the  soldier  than  all  the  devotional  books,  and 


MENTAL  AND  SOCIAL  SERVITUDE    149 

would  fully  supply  the  lack  of  all  popular  maga- 
zines and  newspapers,  in  which,  on  every  page 
one  observes  the  financial  speculations  of  the 
publishers  more  than  any  real  advantage  to  the 
public,  and  through  which  only  a  hurtful  thirst 
for  reading  is  spread  among  the  common 
people.  .  .  ." 

King  Frederick  William  III  of  Prussia  added 
in  this  circular  order  that  the  teaching  of  his- 
tory "should  limit  itself  solely  to  the  most  im- 
portant national  events,  and  have  no  other  pur- 
pose than  to  awaken  patriotic  love  and  affec- 
tion, pride  in  the  deeds  of  our  forefathers  and 
the  desire  to  emulate  them.9' 

As  an  effect  of  this  "educational"  policy  the 
reader  will  at  once  see  how  the  German  people 
under  their  Kaiser  of  to-day  set  out  in  1914  on 
a  career  of  conquest  in  emulation  of  that  of 
Frederick  the  Great  who  stole  Silesia  from  the 
very  Queen  that  by  treaty  he  had  bound  him- 
self to  defend,  and  in  emulation  of  Kaiser 
William  I  who  in  1870  stole  Alsace-Lorraine 
from  France. 

Commenting  on  the  foregoing  circular  order 
issued  by  Frederick  William  III  in  1799,  Pro- 
fessor Alexander  remarks  that  Frederick 
William  III  wanted  a  meagerly-educated,  con- 
tented lower  class.  Every  Kaiser  ever  since  has 


150  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

wanted  the  same.  Elsewhere  in  his  volume, 
Professor  Alexander  observes  of  this  royal  cir- 
cular order  of  1799: 

"No  passage  in  the  history  of  the  Prussian 
elementary  school  states  so  clearly  the  attitude 
of  the  Prussian  policy  toward  popular  educa- 
tion. It  aids  in  interpreting  the  methods  and 
purposes  of  elementary  education  in  Prussia 
and  Germany  to-day.  The  common  man  must 
have  a  limited  amount  of  knowledge  only,  and 
it  must  be  taught  him  in  a  way  that  he  can  be 
logically  content  with  his  lot  in  life  and  may 
not  look  with  envy  and  hate  upon  those  who 
have  been  born  in  higher  stations.  This  pas- 
sage epitomizes  the  difference  between  the 
ideals  of  Germany  and  America  with  reference 
to  the  common  people. " 

The  "  educational "  policies  ordered  by  Fred- 
erick the  Great  and  his  successors  are  those 
prevailing  in  Germany  to  this  very  day.  We 
have  already  in  this  work  quoted  from  a  speech 
of  the  present  Kaiser,  William  HI,  sneering  at 
popular  education.  Of  present  conditions  in 
Germany's  elementary  schools  Professor  Alex- 
ander says: 

"The  Volksschulen  in  Germany  are,  there- 
fore, for  the  very  large  under  class.  Class  lines 
are  very  marked,  and  those  lower  orders  of  so- 


MENTAL  AND  SOCIAL  SERVITUDE    151 

ciety  which  send  their  children  to  the  Volks- 
schulen  very  rarely  even  think  of  breaking  over 
into  the  forbidden  fields.  There  is,  further- 
more, a  marked  difference  in  the  quality  of  pu- 
pils in  the  upper  schools  and  those  of  the  lower. 
The  lower  classes  unconsciously  admit  their  in- 
feriority in  their  attitude  to  the  ruling  ten  thou- 
sand, and  they  have  maintained  this  attitude 
for  so  long,  that  they  are  now  really  inferior, 
mentally,  morally  and  physically.  This  inferi- 
ority may  often  show  itself  in  a  form  of  hatred 
of  the  better  classes,  or  in  an  uncouth  impu- 
dence or  bravado  but  it  is  nevertheless  an  ack- 
nowledged inferiority. ' '  ("The  Prussian  Ele- 
mentary Schools,"  page  87.) 

According  further  to  Professor  Alexander, 
this  under  class  in  Germany  is  composed  of  the 
peasants,  small  tradesmen,  subordinate  officials, 
artisans  and  other  laboring  classes.  It  com- 
prises fully  90  per  cent  of  the  total  population. 

"About  one  hundred  years  ago,  and  again 
forty-five  years  ago,"  says  Professor  Alexander 
further,  "the  leaders  of  the  German  nation  de- 
termined to  place  Germany  in  the  place  of  lead- 
ership among  the  nations  of  the  world.  To  ac- 
complish this  end  a  highly  developed  leadership, 
both  leaders  and  followers,  was  necessary.  The 
universities  and  the  higher  schools  have  trained 


152  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

the  leaders;  the  Volksschnlen  have  trained  the 
followers.  TTie  great  masses  Have  been  molded 
and  cast  in  one  die — they  think  alike, — they  act 
alike.  What  they  think  and  do  is  determined  by 
the  leaders  of  the  nation.  This  is  achieved  by 
the  Volksschulen." 

How  do  the  German  elementary  schools  do 
it?  The  answer  is  simple. 

"In  two  subjects,  history  and  religion,  is 
found  the  key  to  the  whole  situation.  The 
courses  of  study  in  these  subjects  are  so  selected 
that  a  certain  attitude  of  mind  and  a  certain 
mind  content  are  afforded  the  lower  classes, 
which  when  finally  fixed  in  the  consciousness  of 
the  people  means  devotion  to  the  Emperor  and 
self-abnegation  and  devotion  to  the  State. 
Those  portions  of  the  Bible  are  chosen  which 
have  most  to  do  with  obedience  to  the  Holy 
Father  and  his  representatives  on  earth,  which 
are,  in  this  case,  the  princes  of  Hohenzol- 
lern.  .  .  . 

"By  an  inordinate  amount  of  memorization 
of  the  selected  facts,  by  a  constant  drill  on  the 
achievements  and  power  of  the  German  nation, 
by  line  upon  line,  and  precept  upon  precept,  for 
eight  years,  and  then  by  service  in  the  army, 
fhe  youthful  mind  is  Germanized,  is  set  like 
adamant  and  is  capable  of  no  change.  The 


MENTAL  AND  SOCIAL  SERVITUDE    153 

work  of  the  Volksschulen  is  accomplished,  for 
the  masses  think  alike  and  respond  as  a  man  to 
the  slightest  suggestion  from  authority." 
("The  Prussian  Elementary  Schools/'  page 
554.) 

This  explains  what  has  puzzled  so  many  of 
our  Federal  judges  as  well  as  Americans  in  gen- 
eral. In  sentencing  to  prison  various  offenders 
of  German  birth  and  upbringing  convicted  of 
sedition,  several  of  our  judges  expressed  their 
amazement  at  one  notorious  fact.  Some  of  these 
particular  Germans  had  been  resident  in  Amer- 
ica for  long  periods,  from  16  to  24  years,  and 
long  ago  had  become  naturalized  citizens.  Yet 
instead  of  assimilating  themselves,  they  per- 
sisted in  thinking  as  Germans,  and  did  not  even 
try  to  think  as  Americans.  They  professed  to 
become  American  citizens,  but  in  reality  they 
retained  their  allegiance  to  Germany,  its  rulers 
and  ideas.  They  and  their  kind  made  groups 
of  "Little  Germanys"  in  many  places  in  the 
United  States. 

They  were  typical  products  of  the  Volks- 
schulen system  in  Germany.  Their  mental 
processes  had  been  formed  there,  and  so  thor- 
oughly had  they  become  saturated  with  those 
poisonous  teachings,  that  twenty  years  of  living 
in  the  free  atmosphere  of  America  had  not 


154  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

changed  their  outlook  one  particle.  This  fur- 
ther verifies  Professor  Alexander's  comment 
that  the  one  ineradicable  effect  of  Germany's  so- 
called  educational  system  is  to  harden  the  mind 
to  such  an  unchangeable  degree  that  it  is  in- 
capable of  learning  new  things  or  of  responding 
to  other  ideas. 

To  a  larger  extent  it  is  this  pseudo  educa- 
tional system  that  is  mainly  responsible  for  the 
German  people's  national  megalomania.  It  is 
also  the  basic  cause  of  their  committing  the 
most  atrocious  barbarisms  at  the  command  of 
their  masters. 

Dr.  Thomas  F.  A.  Smith,  who  for  many  years 
was  English  lecturer  in  the  University  of  Er- 
langen,  Germany,  thus  observes : 

"The  German  Government  does  not  wish  any 
of  its  schools  to  teach  self-reliance  or  independ- 
ence of  thought  and  action ;  it  is  no  part  of  the 
school's  duty  to  cultivate  in  the  individual  a 
conscience  which  is  to  become  his  king.  The 
dictates  governing  a  man's  actions,  the  motives 
inspiring  his  deeds  must  not  come  from  within, 
the  State  will  supply  those — from  without.  In 
this  manner  educated  automata  are  created, 
whose  impulses  of  motion  do  not  radiate  from 
within,  but  from  a  brain  center  outside  them." 
("The  Soul  of  Germany,"  page  30.) 


MENTAL  AND  SOCIAL  SERVITUDE    155 

This  fact  is  also  well  pointed  out  by  Karl 
Ludwig  Krause,  a  German  himself,  in  his  re- 
markable volume  "What  Is  the  German  Nation 
Dying  For?"  It  is  dying  for  the  sake  of  cer- 
tain ideas  that  the  rulers  of  Germany  have  cun- 
ningly used  the  elementary  schools  to  instil.  It 
believes  in  those  ideas  because  it  knows  no 
other,  and  was  never  permitted  to  learn  any 
other. 

For  generations  those  ideas  have  been  so  sys- 
tematically soaked  into  the  heads  of  the  German 
people  that  they  have  constituted  a  horrid  men- 
ace to  the  entire  world.  And  they  are  still  a 
menace  and  will  remain  so  until  Germany's 
school  system  is  done  away  with  and  replaced 
by  one  that  does  not  teach  the  youth  that  mili- 
tarism is  a  glorious  thing  and  that  each  genera- 
tion of  Germans  should  emulate  the  predatory 
deeds  done  by  their  forefathers  at  the  command 
of  robber  rulers.  Germany's  present  rulers 
have  caused  the  slaughter  of  many  millions  of 
human  beings  including  millions  of  Germans 
themselves,  and  the  slaughter  is  not  ended.  But 
the  elementary  schools  of  Germany  are  still 
busily  teaching  the  very  ideas  that  were  even 
more  of  a  preparation  for  this  world  slaughter 
than  armies  or  armaments.  Unless  those  teach- 
ings are  stopped,  another  generation  of  Ger- 


156  THE  GERMAN  MYTH 

mans  will  grow  up  with,  precisely  the  same  ideas 
that  impelled  the  German  armies  violating  and 
ravaging  Belgium  and  France,  devastating  Rus- 
sia and  Serbia,  bullying,  bribing,  murdering 
wherever  they  went.  The  elementary  school 
system  of  Germany  is  the  great  instrument  used 
by  Germany's  ruthless  rulers  to  enslave  the 
people  and  make  them  completely  pliable  to 
their  plundering  schemes. 


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